


Mad Science

by SheliakBob



Category: Man-Made Monster (1941), The Invisible Ray (1936), The Mad Doctor of Market Street (1942)
Genre: Universal Monsters
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-30
Updated: 2018-09-11
Packaged: 2019-06-19 01:22:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 34
Words: 33,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15499146
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SheliakBob/pseuds/SheliakBob
Summary: A mad genius working in an old slave fort in Africa acquires the body of "Dynamo" Dan McCormick, the Electrical Man. He revives the electrified Man Made Monster and uses him in a scheme to master the powers of Radium X, an extraterrestrial radioactive substance which fell to Earth in a meteorite. Unknown to the mad doctor, Janos Rukh--long thought dead, has reappeared, still dangerously radioactive, and has his own plans for using Radium X. Two young couples become enmeshed in the power struggle between the maddest of scientists and only a disgraced and dying Dr. Benet can come to their rescue!





	1. Chapter 1

MAD SCIENCE  
THE MAN-MADE MONSTER IN THE MORGUE  
Lightning flashed, white tinged blue, in a night sky boiling with black thunderclouds. The rain fell in wind-driven sheets, slapping across the institutional gray stone face of a blocky building surrounded by trees. Bare branches stabbed at the sky while other limbs, full of wet leaves, lashed and smacked at the stone walls and glass windows. Rainwater ran down stone columns like inverted streams flowing off the roof. Wan, yellow light shone through a few dusty panes, but most were dark and black as gouged eye-sockets. Iron letters bolted to the stone declared “City Morgue” to any approaching near enough through the torrential downpour to read them.  
Inside, a small, wiry man in white orderly’s scrubs pushed a gurney holding a sheet-covered body down a long hallway. He had to lean into the gurney, to keep it from veering to the side. One wheel kept trying to turn sideways against the yellowed linoleum floor and made occasional squeaks, loud and screeching like an angry rat. The walls and curved ceiling were a continuous arch of white tiles, like flat white teeth stacked atop one another. Bare light-bulbs in wire cages threw circles of harsh white light on the floor, each separated by long stretches of gloom in between. The only sounds were the squeaking of the gurney’s wheels, the distant drum of rain against the outer walls, and the wheezing of the man as he fights against that stubborn wheel.  
The hallway ended in tall double doors and the man pushed through them with a grunt. As the doors bang open, a limp, pale hand spills out from under the sheet. The man tucks it back under casually.  
Beyond the doors is a large, high-ceilinged room. The wide, open floor is covered with dozens of sheet-shrouded bodies on carts, arranged in neat orderly rows, from wall to wall. The only light is another caged bulb blazing over a huge teak desk piled high with stacks of papers and folders. Another white-clad man sits at the table, absently thumbing through the tattered pages of a newspaper. It looks like he is torturing a huge gray moth out of boredom.   
“I’ve got another one for you.”  
The man at the desk doesn’t look up but just waves toward a nearby row of carts.  
The first man shoves the gurney in that general direction, ignoring it as it wanders off course and bangs against a wall. He hops up on one edge of the table, squinting at the other man’s newspaper.   
“Anything interesting?”  
The attendant sniffs and shakes his head.   
“Nothing in here.”  
He casts a sly sideways look at the orderly. “Want to see something…really interesting?” he says, with a ghoulish grin.  
The two men stand in front of a metal door, recessed into the wall. A faded, flaking “Keep Out” sign is bolted to it.  
The attendant pulls out a heavy ring of keys, fumbles through it until he finds the right one, and chuckles sinisterly.  
“What’s in there?”  
“This is where they keep the…’police cases’. The bodies of murder victims that may be needed for ongoing investigations. For evidence.”  
There was a loud thunk as the key turned, and the door swings open, creaking ominously. A gust of cold air rushes out. The men’s breathes steam as they step into the icy chamber. The attendant throws a big metal switch, uncomfortably like those used for electric chairs. There is a loud snap and a humming noise that steadily builds until the whole room lights up glaringly white under light bulbs arranged together like petals of incandescent flowers. There are only a few bodies out, wrapped under blood stained sheets. More are locked in stainless steel lockers built into the walls.   
The attendant leads his co-worker over to one body in particular, one covered with a dusty sheet, cart rolled against the stained plaster between two sets of lockers. Cobwebs have built up between the cart and the wall.  
“Ready?” The attendant grins, eyebrows twitching uncontrollably.   
The orderly, gulps and nods, eyes fixed on the contours of the sheet lying across the unseen face beneath.  
The attendant begins to laugh, a strained, raspy laugh that builds in his throat and squeezes nasally upward.  
He slowly peels the sheet off of the corpse’s face.  
The face revealed is broad and chalky white, dark where the skin has sunken in around the eyes and cheeks. It is contorted in a tight grimace of pain or sorrow. Deep dark lines crease his flesh, his hair is stiff, half frozen in the cold and mostly white, as if the color has been leeched out of it.  
The attendant, still making his hiccup-sounding laugh pulls the sheet farther down to show the thick suit of green gum-rubber still covering the body. There are rents torn into it and bits of gouged but bloodless flesh show through. The dead man’s eyes are deep black sockets. At first they look hollow, but the blackened and shriveled lids can be seen when the light shines down into them.  
“So?” The orderly asks, running one hand through his own hair. “He’s a stiff. An ugly one to be sure, but what’s so special about ‘im?”  
“Don’t you recognize him?” the attendant asks, his laugh cutting off abruptly. “That’s Dynamo Dan—the Electrical Man, they called him. You remember? The murderer they tried to execute in the electric chair, but he soaked up all the juice they could throw at him and broke out of the chair. Killed a bunch of guards—and the Warden too! Killed and terrified the whole city and tried to carry off that young woman before they caught up with him.”  
The orderly squints at the lined, pale face. A look of amazement slowly rolls across his own face, starting at the brow and sort of leaking downward across the cheeks until it pulled his mouth open in a round “o” of wonder.  
“How long has he been here, like that?”  
“That’s just it!” says the attendant, with delicious relish. “That body has been lying there on that gurney for nigh unto two years now—while the authorities and the doctors and the scientists argue about what to do with him. Why the girl he tried to kidnap filed a lawsuit trying to make them give him to her so’s she could give ‘im a ‘proper burial’! But then there’s so many who wants to dissect ‘im that he’s just been sitting here, waiting for the judges to decide who owns his cold hide.”  
The orderly squints, mouth skewed up in disbelief at that.  
Carefully he reaches out one finger as if to poke the corpse in the cheeks, but he stops himself and looks to the attendant.  
“Go on.” He says, grinning a skull-tight grin. “Touch ‘im!”  
The orderly swallows, then does. The skin is soft and still supple under his fingertip.  
While the orderly stares in disbelief, the attendant takes on rubber-clad arm and flexes it, pausing to waggle a friendly ‘hullo” with the dead man’s hand.  
“Two years?”  
The attendant nods solemnly.   
“Two years with never a sign of rot or decay or even rigor mortis. It’s like he’s just been sleeping here all that time. But he don’t breathe and his heart don’t beat, at all. It’s like he ain’t even really dead, just lying there, waiting for the signal to sit up and walk right out of the morgue.  
His harsh laughter echoed unpleasantly in the small, very cold room.  
A thoughtful look creeps onto the orderly’s face.  
“You know what?” barely a whisper. “I know a man who would pay a great deal of money for a body like this.” He nodded.  
It was the attendant’s turn to squint.  
“How much money?”  
The orderly breaks into a sly, conspiratorial smile. “A very, very great deal of money!”   
The attendant rubs his chin and looks around, almost nervously.  
The only witnesses present are the bloodied corpses beneath their stained shrouds.  
“After two years, it’s not like anyone’s going to miss ‘im right away. That’s for sure!”  
“A very great deal of money. Enough to quit these gruesome night jobs and move somewhere far away. Somewhere warm!”  
They both smiled evil smiles and nodded with shared greed.

The rear entrance to the building was a wide black cavern with swinging doors, large enough to swallow vans or trucks whole, with ease. A battered wooden-sided panel truck pulls up, creeping up to the gates, splashing through puddles as the rain continues to fall—if anything, harder than before, lashing at the unholy undertaking now being carried out beneath its gray veils.  
Two men, just dark shapes, come out of the deep black belly of the building, pushing a wooden crate on a cart. Several other men hunch together, talking harshly. Money changes hands. A wooden box, a traveling coffin, is slid into the back of the truck and covered with a tarp.  
Two of the shapes pocket their money and scatter off into the night as the truck lumbers slowly away, edging downhill toward the city.  
Below, the city lights glow. Streets stretch out over hills like the tentacles of a giant octopus, quivering phosphorescent yellow in the deep dark depths. The sky overhead is filled with crackling, sketchy fingers of lightning, like the legs of a fiery purple spider crouching among the clouds. As the fury of the storm picks up, the spider legs and street lamped tentacles seem to reach for each other, prepared to lock into a deadly grapple.


	2. Man Made Monster Delivery

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dynamo Dan's lifeless body arrives at the lair of a mysterious madman.

MAN-MADE MONSTER DELIVERY  
A long, weathered-looking motor-launch chugged its way across rough seas, its engine throbbing and throwing up a white froth behind it. Several men were crammed into the sides of the boat while a large wooden crate sat in the center. The men were of several ethnicities, most were mixed, all surly and rough-looking with worn, stained work clothes and bandanas wrapped over their heads. One man stood in the prow, clutching the gunwales every time the boat slapped over, or crashed through a wave. The man wore dingy white pants and a white jacket over a yellowed shirt. He had an eye-patch and a week’s worth of scraggily beard.  
Whether it was night or day was uncertain under the dark clouds that cover the sky. The wind of a tropical Atlantic storm whipped up choppy waves and blew spray like horizontal rain from off the white caps. Though the wind was sharp and cold, the sea water was hot as soup. The warm spray in the air smelled uncomfortably like spilled blood.  
In the distance behind them, at the far end of a long scar of white foam, an old rust-bucket tramp freighter wallowed and listed in the waves. Ahead of them loomed a grim stone building, an old Portuguese fort left over from the days of the slave trade, Fort Sao Lazare, a half-ruined castle with battlements and rounded turrets of reddish stone. Deep gun ports were spaced along the wall. Where once cannons pointed out to sea, now flocks of sea birds nest in the empty sockets. The fort was dominated by a squat central tower, like a round keep. A landing dock faced outward from the curtain wall like a long roofless tunnel, with stairs cut into the sea wall, leading up to a flat loading bay. A heavy wooden door, reinforced with bands of black-iron faced the loading dock under the watchful eyes of gun-slits, infested with tropical lizards.  
The launch waddled into the notch, banging and scraping against the barnacled stone walls until it fetched up against a cluster of wooden posts. One of the men leaped to the flat ledge, while another tossed him a rope. Together they lashed the bobbing boat to the moorings. The men struggled to lift the box out of the boat and drag it across the narrow quay to the great wooden door. As they neared the door, hollow banging sounds could be heard from the other side. There was a long scrap as the door was unbarred from within and a clang as metal chains were dropped loose. The door creaked open slowly, revealing a dark, cavernous space beyond. Shirtless black natives, barefoot and wearing only tattered pants and rope belts shuffled out to take the box and drag it inside. Their mouths hung open and their eyes were blank and white as boiled eggs. They were supervised by a misshapen dwarf wearing beige khakis and a child-sized pith helmet. He grinned cruelly and barked at the native workers in some harsh African tongue. He carried a black leather riding crop, which he waved vigorously but he never actually struck any of the workers. He never came within arm’s reach of them and it was plain that he both hated and feared them.  
For their part, the native workers were expressionless, oblivious to anything but the task at hand. They made no sounds save for wheezing, rattling breaths and the rasp of their feet on the stone as they shoved the box through the door.  
The boatmen stood their ground on the quay, not moving to enter the dank, black chamber beyond the door but gruffly refusing to shrink away from the silent workers. They grumbled amongst themselves. There was some light shoving and barks of laughter until the man with the eye-patch glared at them with his sole good eye.  
A stout-bodied man in a white suit with black boots strode out of the door. His face and hands were covered with strips of linen bandages, wound tightly around his head and pinned in the back. Dark glasses covered his eyes.  
The lead boatman nodded to him.  
“Here’s your cursed box! Now where is our money?”   
He growled but his coarse voice was a bluff. He fidgeted in place and his gaze darted about uneasily, as if looking for the most convenient escape route.  
The man in the suit chuckled and pulled a thick roll of bills from his pocket and tossed it to the man. His manner was casual and rather amused.  
“It better all be there.” growled the boatman.  
“Oh, it is! It is.” assured the bandaged man. “And a sizeable bonus to boot.”  
The boatman thumbed through the roll and grunted in approval. After quickly counting it, he peeled off a wad and stuffed it in his pants pocket, then he distributed the rest among his men.  
“”Is that all?” the boatman asked, after paying the men.  
“I have a few packets of letters and some parcels to be shipped out.”   
He waved to one of the silent workers who brought an armful of packages out of the dark. The boatman’s aide, a thick-browed ape of a man with curly black hair and a heavy jaw, took the parcels and handed them down to the men who were already climbing back aboard the launch.  
The bandaged man watched them scurry off the quay with almost comical haste and chuckled.  
“Are you sure you don’t want to stay for a drink, Captain? I have some very passable gin on hand and I hate to drink it alone.”  
The boatman shook his head. Obviously in a hurry to be away.  
“No time. We have to be back out to sea and down the coast before this storm hits shore.”  
The bandaged man nodded affably.  
“Another time then.”  
The boatman clambered aboard and the launch, its motor already fired up, chugged back out of the dock, swinging around, punching over a swell, then roared off back out to sea toward the distant freighter.  
The bandaged man waved merrily from the dock, his dwarf assistant mimicking the gesture.  
“I’d like some gin.” Squeaked the dwarf petulantly.  
“Quiet you!”  
As the launch bounced and thudded away at full speed, the boatman’s aide leaned forward and yelled over the roar of the engine.  
“That bird gives me the creeps!”  
The captain nodded.   
“He pays well enough.”  
“So does the devil, but he’s still buying your soul when he gives you the gold. They say that fellow back there—they say he has no face under those bandages. No face at all! It’s all eaten away!”  
“They say a lot of things.” Grunted the boatman. “If they can pay me better than he does, I’ll listen to them!”


	3. Dr. Riga's Forbidden Journal

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The research journal of Dr. Riga is acquired through means most foul.

DR. RIGA’S FORBIDDEN JOURNAL  
A sleek black luxury sedan rolled to a halt by the curb in front of the building housing the newspaper’s office. The headlights had been doused half a block from its destination and it sat like a shark in the shadows beneath a busted streetlamp. The engine rumbled softly while the car idled.  
Inside, the driver, who was a portly man with curly hair, leaned across the seat to whisper to his companion.  
“What we are looking for is a small, thick notebook, dark binding, the edges have been burnt in a fire. It should be locked in a tin box in a drawer at [newsman’s] desk. The office is on the third floor. Don’t let anyone stop you. Don’t let anyone see you. If someone does, you know what to do.”  
His silent companion nodded slowly.  
“Now, do you understand what I want you to do?”  
The silent man nodded again.  
“Then go!”  
The door of the sedan creaked open and the silent man half-rolled out of the car. He staggered a few steps then slowly righted himself, turning toward the newspaper building. He was of average build with red hair and a thick scruff of russet beard. His face was white as chalk, his eyes glassy and unfocussed. His mouth hung slackly open.  
“Go!” hissed the driver impatiently.  
At his command, the silent man lurched forward and crashed straight through the plate-glass window, without even trying the door, which was locked in any event.  
The driver sighed, casting wary glances around the empty street, and pulled a creased letter from his coat pocket.

My Dear Friend and Colleague, read the neat, carefully penned script.  
I must ask one more favor of you. I have recently acquired a most remarkable specimen from which I have learned a great deal. Unfortunately, however, the papers I received with him are incomplete and while the procedure I used was sufficient to revive him, I have not been able to quite duplicate the results from the original experiment. I need the more complete notes of the original researcher, one Dr. Riga. I have learned that while those notes were reported destroyed, burned in a fireplace by a reporter for the Star-Press named Mark Adams, in truth Adams could not bring himself to entirely destroy such an important find. The notebook was surreptitiously retrieved from the fire and secretly transported to the newspaper offices, where it is kept under lock and key. The man’s fiancé, wife now I hear, is completely unaware of her husband’s actions in this matter.  
If possible, I need you to acquire that journal for me through whatever means prove most expedient. It seems pointless for me to offer payment for this great service I ask, in that it is the generous stipend provided by your family that funds my experiments. In lieu of monetary recompense, I offer the notes and records of one of my own early experiments as well as the current disposition of the subject. I hope that this specimen might be of some interest, even use, to you—as I believe the apparent failure of that experiment may not be as complete as originally thought. 

The man in the car had to nod to himself, having found the specimen spoken of in the letter to have been quite interesting indeed, and more than a little useful.  
From somewhere in the building came the sound of gunshots and breaking glass. Something wet and broken fell with a thud onto the sidewalk.  
The man sighed and returned to the letter.

I believe Dr. Riga’s notes will provide a wealth of information and numerous practical uses for this experiment. Any portions of your father or grandfather’s notes that you can share would also, doubtless, be of great assistance.

“Doubtless!” laughed the man with a twisted smile.

Forgive me, old friend. You know that I have to keep trying, and the effort, I’m sure, has become an expected aspect of these correspondences.  
Thank you, my friend.

“Etcetera, etcetera, and please send more money if you are able.” The man chuckled. “You pompous old leech! You’re lucky that my family owes yours such a debt—and that I find you so amusing”  
Footsteps crunched on broken glass approaching the car at a hurried pace. The driver leaned over and opened the door as his companion came stumbling to the car.   
“Well, hello there!” He exclaimed as the ashen faced man lurched into the seat. Despite the still smoking bullet holes in his dark shirt, the man’s face was blank and unconcerned as he handed a tin lockbox to his master, who studied it briefly before tossing it in the back seat.  
“Saunders!” he exclaimed with some annoyance. “You’ve got bullet holes again. You’re bleeding all over my upholstery, again!”  
Saunders turned glassy, lifeless eyes toward his master.  
“Well, I suppose I’ll just have to stitch you up. Again. “  
He gunned the engine and roared off as sirens wailed in the distance.


	4. The Return of Dr. Rukh

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dr. Janos Rukh, thought immolated by radioactive fire at the end of "The Invisible Ray" returns to Earth, having burned through Time and Space.

THE RETURN OF DR. RUKH  
Outside the courtyard of the Stevens House, Paris.  
It was a quiet night outside of a darkened manor. The soft murmur of Paris after midnight lapped against the outer brick wall of the courtyard like surf washing against a sea wall. Above the courtyard dusty and unlighted windows looked down like dull, blank eyes. Sheets of wood covered one window. Overhead ice cold stars stared down from a cloudless sky, like millions of unblinking alien eyes. On the ground shards of glass scattered across the bricks twinkled in the starlight.  
A gust of hot wind suddenly buffeted the courtyard, rattled the panes in the windows. A ghastly green glow, a phosphorescent fog appeared in mid-air churning like a radioactive storm in miniature. With an angry hiss and crackle, the fog burst into green fire, burning a hole through thin air.  
A man’s body plummeted out of the swirling fiery glow. A long black coat fluttered behind him like ineffectual bat wings. He hit the ground with a loud thud and lie very still. For a long while he lie motionless on the ground, dark brown eyes blinking uncomprehendingly at the starry sky above. Eventually he groaned and rolled over. Pale long-fingered hands pressed against the bricks. He lurched to his feet, swaying unsteadily. He glared angrily at the dark house. A wordless growl of rage rumbled in his chest. He cast quick glances around him, spied a metal trashcan sitting against the wall, lifted it and sent it crashing through a ground floor window.  
Using the curtains spilling out of the shattered pane as handholds, he climbed up and through the window. Shaking his fists he strode into an empty sitting room. The chairs and tables around him were shrouded with white sheets. Dust lie heavy on the floor.  
For several long minutes he stood wavering by the window. Then with a burst of rage-fired energy he tore through the room, ripping off the sheets and knocking end tables aside. He yanked open the door and stalked into a wide reception room. This too was empty. More tables and chairs covered with sheets. A rostrum stood partially exposed by the sheet that has slid half off it. Dust puffs up from the floor with each angry step he takes. He turned about, searching the room for signs of the crowd that his murky memories tell him should be there. He raises a fist and shakes it impotently in the air. Long strides take him through the ground floor rooms, chairs and tables and urns crash to the floor in his wake. Pots and pans clatter about the empty kitchen.  
Swaying, casting frantically about, he found himself at the foot of a grand, sweeping staircase. Again he growled up at the empty darkness.  
“Diane!” he shouted as he stalked up the stairs.  
“MOTHER!” He roared as he stared at a shattered window covered with wood.  
Finally, after tearing through the whole empty house for over an hour, he wandered back to the sitting room and collapsed exhausted in a chair. His fingers plucked listlessly at a stack of papers next to the chair. A headline catches his eye.  
“Dr. Benet Leaves Paris in Disgrace!”   
The headline makes him chuckle.  
“Radium X Scandal Widens.”  
A wolfish, lopsided grin on his face, Dr. Janos Ruhk lapses into a deep, much-needed sleep.  
He felt cold and tired, like a burned out bonfire and his dreams were all smoke and shadows.


	5. Rukh at the Renault Clinic

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Janos Rukh investigates the consequences of the "Radium X Scandal"

RUKH AT THE RENAULT CLINIC  
Wearing a wide-brimmed hat, with a scarf covering his lower face, Rukh set off to investigate the Paris clinic of Dr. Renault mentioned in the newspaper stories as the place where the victims of the “Radium X Scandal” were receiving treatment. Trying not to be seen, Rukh approached down a back alley but as he neared the clinic he found the alley crowded with malformed wretches, some hunched, others dragging useless limbs. Most had their faces covered with scarves, just like Rukh. Some wore canvas sacks with eyeholes cut into them over their heads. To his surprise, many had faintly luminescent skin, their flesh glowing greenish from the radioactive toxin in their blood.  
They did not impede his progress. Most seemed to barely notice him. Those that did take note of his covered features and the phosphorescence of his exposed brow and assumed he is one of them. The occasional rough nod or wheezy incoherent grunts were all he attracted, and no one seemed bothered or takes it askance that he never returns their greetings. He is just one more of the damned, shuffling about this back alley hell, too tainted to walk the streets, too toxic to be given shelter.  
At the end of the alley he found the streetside front of the clinic. A glass door stood in a curved, archway, ablaze with light. The glass was covered with delicately scrawled black letters. The French translates to “The Renault Clinic for the Treatment of Luminous Poison”.  
As he watches a fancy car pulls up and worried parents hustle a bundled figure—crying beneath her fur wraps and coat—across the sidewalk up the short flight of three concrete steps and through the door. As soon as the car pulled up, misshapen, ragged figures pushed past Rukh, spilling out of the mouth of the alley, bleating incoherently, hands raised, begging. The well-dressed father digs into his pockets and throws a handful of coins on the sidewalk to distract the beggars as his family pushes past them.  
Black-uniformed guards stand by the door. As Rukh enters they hold out gloved hands to stop him.  
“Hold on there! Do you have an appointment?”   
Rukh snarled at them and pulled a fist out of his pocket, raising it to face level in front of the guard. His anger sends a pulse of sickly greenish light crawling over his knuckles, visible even under the blazing overhead lights. The guard’s eyes go wide and he takes an involuntary step back.  
“We’ve got a Luminescent by the door!” he bellows.   
The guards carefully pull back out of arm’s reach. Those nearby shrink from him, clearly terrified.   
“Now, hold on just a minute sir!” one guard says, trying to sound soothing but instead taking on the patronizing tone of a man talking to a child. “We’ll get you to a doctor, right away! Just don’t get excited or nothing!”  
“We’re your friends!” chimes the other guard, nodding ludicrously.  
Rukh grins like a hungry wolf.  
“My friends, eh? It’s good to have friends, isn’t it? Well, my friend, why don’t you greet me with a warm embrace?”  
He raises his arms toward the nodding guard, who falls over his own legs trying to scurry back from him. Once fallen on the slick tiled floor, he continued to move backwards like a frightened crab fleeing the oncoming surf.  
An authoritative voice cracks like a whip, “Here now! Let’s have none of that! Andre, get up. You’re making a spectacle of yourself.”  
The speaker is a doctor with a stern prematurely aged face on a young body, wrapped in a white medical smock.  
“Dr. Renault?” Rukh asks, eyeing the man who is plainly too young to be the eminent if eccentric doctor known to him.  
To his surprise the man nods, curtly. “The Younger.” He states without a smile. “My father runs the clinic. I am merely one of his assistants.” A flicker of a scowl crosses his face. “Please, come with me to one of the examination rooms.”  
Together they enter a side room, darkened but for a lamp on a table in the corner.  
“Here, let me take a look at you.” He orders, sitting down on a stool and turning the silver reflecting lens on the band circling head to one side.  
Rukh pulls off his gloves and presents his faintly glowing hands.  
“I prefer not to show my face.” He says in a tone that brooks no argument.  
“Don’t worry. I’ve seen worse around here.” The doctor assures him.  
“Nevertheless.”  
Shrug. “Of course. Have it your way. Let me see your hands.”  
He examines them, noting the fine tracery of luminous veins.  
“How long ago did your Radium X exposure take place?”  
Rukh replies, drolly “I was one of the first so afflicted.”  
The doctor frowns. “That’s hard to believe. Your case is advanced, yes, but you should have died long ago if you were among the first victims. Or even exposed during the first couple of years, given this level of contamination.”  
“I am as amazed that I am alive as you are.”  
The Doctor snaps on a light, prepares a syringe full of mint-green fluid.  
“This anti-toxin will help ease the symptoms for a while. But I can’t offer much hope for the long term. I am sorry.”  
Rukh watches the injection but says nothing.  
“Come back daily and we will continue your treatments for as long as we can.”  
Rukh nods. “You are very kind.”  
The Doctor shakes his head. “We can’t keep you from dying. I hate to be so blunt, but you must know that by now. We will try our best to ease your suffering for the time you have left. I wish there was something hopeful I could say, but…there it is.”  
Rukh smiles beneath his scarf.  
“Do not trouble yourself on my account. I accepted my fate quite a while ago.”  
As Rukh leaves, he looks around the clinic. He recognizes a little girl, now a grown woman, that he saw Dr. Benet treat when he first visited Paris after the Radium X discoveries. Then she was crippled with legs that could barely move. Now, instead of legs she has fleshy, bulbous sheathes of tumorous tissues, boneless, dead looking despite the uncontrollable writhing beneath the skin.  
Another young victim turns suddenly toward Rukh. His eyes are huge pancake-sized masses of bubbled white tissue, lidless, unblinking. “I can see you!” he shouts suddenly. He rises from his chair, pointing excitedly at Rukh. “I can see you, Green Man! Like a torch in the night!” He breaks up into hysterical laughter mixed with sobs. “Like a torch in the night!”  
Rukh hurries out.  
On the sidewalk, now cleared of both coins and beggars, a sudden horrible idea wriggles into his brain.  
Mother Rukh! He treated his own mother’s with Radium X. He treated her eyes, gave her vision again. What if by doing so he has condemned her, his own mother, to the same disfiguring fate of these wretched victims? Wringing his hand s urgently, he strides off into the night, already oblivious to the Paris around him, eyes already cast toward the distant Carpathian Mountains…


	6. Castle Rukh

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Janos Rukh returns home to learn his mother's fate.

CASTLE RUKH  
The Carpathian Mountains, peaks rise like jagged black teeth beneath a steadily darkening gray sky. A narrow, deeply rutted road clings to the mountainside, curving slowly upward. Beneath, sheer cliffs drop off straight down to a black-watered river that churns and hisses through a narrow chasm far below. Night has already fallen down in the canyon, even though it is still a couple of hours away up in the peaks. The water glistens blackly, like oil spilled down a wound in the side of the mountain slope.  
A man, tightly bundled in a black cloak-like coat trudges up the winding road. A black slouch hat is pulled low over his face, the bottom half of which is covered by a black scarf. His eyes glitter with dark determination. Having seen the horrible disfigurements suffered by others who received Radium X therapy, he must return home, where he himself treated his mother’s blindness with the very same radiation. His mind is tortured by hideous images of what may have become of her—eye sockets filled with polypous growth, unblinking staring white blisters, tears of radioactive pus running down her weathered cheeks.   
He pauses in his march to press one hand to his face, trying to scrub the gruesome images from his mind. With a half sigh and half growl, he drops his hand into a fist and renews his march up the mountain lane. The image still wavers before his mind’s eye, like venomous vapors.  
At length, well after night has fallen even on the highest craggy peaks, he sees the familiar dark silhouette of Castle Rukh, his family’s home for generations. Dark battlements like teeth line the walls, but where once there was a great stone keep, now rises the silvered metal dome of an observatory. Only a few of the manor’s great windows are lit. Most of the edifice is dark and black as the night.  
Rukh climbs over rocks and through a sally port door, the key to which is hidden in its usual place, inside the mouth of a grotesque gargoyle sculpture on the wall beside the door. By hidden stairs and dusty secret passages, which he played in as a boy, Janos makes his way to the heart of the castle, where he slips out into an unlit hallway, to a railing overlooking the vast main hall of the estate.   
A crimson fire burns low inside a hearth tall enough for a man to walk into, and twice as deep. In a rocking chair beside the fire, Mother Rukh sits, her hands idly knitting some unnecessary garment. There are no lights in the hall but the faint glow of the fire. Her hair is whiter now, the lines on her face clearer, deeper. She sits with her eyes closed as she’s done for many years.  
Janos sighs. She is blind again, cheated of her renewed sight by the Radium X, but at least she is not disfigured. At the sound of his sigh, she stops knitting and turns her head straight toward him.  
“Janos?” she whispers, the great empty hall picks up her whisper and sends it echoing to every corner.  
“No, mother. It is just the wind.” He whispers back. He draws back from the railing and disappears back through the walls, to his secret ways.  
“Janos.” Mother Rukh states knowingly.  
A servant comes into the hall and looks around.  
“All the lamps have gone out again. Do you want me to light them?”  
The old woman turns toward the servant.  
“Have they? I did not notice. Don’t bother with them. I can see well enough as it is.”  
The servant nods, bows and with a slight shudder retreats from the room.  
Realizing for the first time that her eyelids are closed, Mother Rukh opens them to reveal brightly shining green orbs, with small black dots for pupils.  
“I see well enough, thanks to you my son.” She grimaces slightly. “I see through darkness and walls, through the very night itself. I see the shapeless things that crawled down our telescopes with the starlight and the shadows of our dead rising like smoke from the crypts beneath my feet. I see you, my son, crawling through the wall like a beetle burrowing in wood.”  
“I have seen where you have been, falling through the empty places between Then and Now. And I can see where you are going. ‘As the rain enters the soil, the river enters the sea, so tears run to a predestined end.’”  
She shakes her head ruefully, then goes back to her knitting.


	7. The Electric Man Lives Again

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dan McCormick is brought back from the dead, The Electric Man lives again!

THE ELECTRIC MAN LIVES AGAIN  
Many nights pass while the Doctor studied his new acquisition. He poured over the scant pages of Riga’s own notes that had been scavenged and shipped with the body of Dan McCormick. Riga’s record of his experiments had been cast into a fire. The edges and many pages were burned, reduced to blackened fragments, but some of the pages in the center of the book survived, albeit in barely legible condition. The Doctor supplemented the damaged notes with excerpts from a symposium lecture published by Riga’s unwitting partner, Dr. John Lawrence, which described in some detail the equipment he and Riga both used, for very different experiments. The Doctor even had much of Riga’s correspondence, which had been carefully collected by the same shadowy gentlemen who contacted him about purchasing the body. All of these materials were spread out across the Doctor’s desk, in stacks and in carefully arranged mosaics of burnt paper, with note cards connecting the pieces, like some vast intellectual jigsaw puzzle.  
Past the Doctor’s cluttered desk, through a thick metal door, open now but usually locked and secured with chains, the lifeless body of Dan McCormick, the “Electric Man” was laid out on a work table, covered with a rubber sheet. The Doctor’s usual pursuits and ongoing experiments were shoved to the margins, racks of test tubes and retorts and jars full of brightly colored liquids and coarse powders in bewildering variety.   
“Given time, “The Doctor mused, lifting his dark glasses to rub weary eyes, “and some new equipment, I think I can reproduce Riga’s machine. But, I do not have either at the moment.”  
He frowned beneath the bandages swathed across his brow. His hand, in almost independently wavered toward the folder-scrap book of newspaper stories about Dynamo Dan.   
“Hmmm. His last rampage seems to have been fueled only by the electric chair itself. He absorbed the current and revived from his stupor. The raw current alone was enough to re-empower him. None of Riga’s special equipment was needed. But without it, Riga’s control over McCormick was broken. The Electric Man acted of his own accord, without Riga’s directions—and eventually turned on his creator.”  
Fingers under surgical glove latex tapped the newspaper photos of a grimacing, snarling Dan McCormick, rising menacingly from the spent electric chair that had failed to kill him.  
“I think we can manage enough current to revive him—but we will have to be careful with him. We must not provoke or frighten him. Without the control treatments, the modulated current passed through his brain, he may become dangerous.  
Napoleon looked up from the rat he was torturing with a scalpel.  
“How are we going to revive him? You said that the generators don’t produce enough electricity to re-energize his tissues.”  
“Yes, but I’ve been thinking about that problem.”  
The Doctor pulled a huge leather bound tome of great age from his bookcase.   
“And I think I have found a solution, something that has been used before to overcome such problems.”

As tropical night fell, black storm clouds sweeping in from a blood red sunset, and waves crashed fitfully against the rocky crag that the Castillo was built on, something stirred along the fortress battlements. Even as the first hot splatters of rain pounded down from the sky, weird, boxy kites rose up to meet the oncoming clouds. Tails of copper wire trailed behind them, anchoring them to the castle and to the lifeless body resting on the laboratory table below. They darted, strangely agile, like colossal bats on the gusts and just after they reached their maximum altitude, jagged blue-white bolts of lightning licked down to slap them.   
The lightning hissed angrily along the copper wire and surged down to a metal collar that was fastened around McCormick’s thick, pulseless neck. The rubber sheet over the body helped to smother the spitting shower of sparks thrown up from the lightning strikes. Steams of sparks, like white hot ash, spewed from under the edges of the sheets. Arcs of frustrated current wavered like angry serpents over the shrouded body.  
The Doctor hugged a stone wall and watched through the parted fingers of a raised hand. He looked like some sort of physician-mummy, wrapped in bandages with a labcoat and thick black goggles. He laughed and nodded with each hissing surge of electrical fury, stolen from the sky. The walls of the castle shook from the thunderbolts lured down to it. Huge white flashes in the narrow windows were seen from miles away.  
Finally the copper wires could bear no more current and fell apart in wet-looking loops, stretched like taffy until they broke into drops of liquid metal. The rubber sheet bubbled and even caught fire, the Doctor having to empty a canister of dry soda to smother the flames. Thick black smoke wreathed the laboratory and swirled like a python seeking an exit through the slit-windows.  
Pulling the half melted sheet away, he could see the electricity buzzing beneath the Electric Man’s skin. McCormick was lit up from within, his dark bones smudges beneath blue-white glowing flesh.  
Suddenly, the dead man’s chest heaved and his mouth gaped open, sucking in a deep, hungry breath. Muscles clenched involuntarily, sending him into an abrupt sit up. His face contorted, checks and lips jerking spasmodically, brow bunched so tight that it might split the skin. An anguished expression seized his features, then softened into a slowly melting mask of sorrow.  
Dan’s eyes snapped open, wild and staring. He rolled his eyes about, taking in the weird tableau of the strange laboratory, the man dressed like a medical-mummy, the dwarf cringing in the corner. Anger and fear and raging despair tore at his features. His mouth wrenched open but only a hoarse, rasping moan emerged.  
“I…killed…him.”  
A second later, the Electric Man howled with grief, clenched fists raised toward the stony ceiling above.  
The Doctor clapped his hands and nodded with glee.  
Napoleon squealed with terror and fled the room, scurrying on stubby legs and lashing his arms about over his head.


	8. Dinner With the Doctor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Drakes Spend an evening dining with their new benefactor, Dr. Graham.

DINNER WITH THE DOCTOR  
After a few more pleasantries, the Director of the clinic, who introduced himself as Dr. Graham, invited the Drakes to join him for dinner and spend the night.  
“I’m afraid we might have some difficulty dressing for dinner.” Ronald Drake said with a boyish smile. “All of our luggage, what wasn’t washed off the boat, is stacked on the beach a couple of miles up the coast. It’s probably been thoroughly rifled through by the freighter crew we were ship-wrecked with. They looked to be a rough and very sordid lot.”  
“Of course! I will have Dr. Wei take some of the men and go retrieve your belongings at once. In the meantime please make yourself comfortable here and do not hesitate to ask if you have need of anything. Anything at all! I will go see if I can round up some clean clothes for you to borrow until we can bring back your own.”  
The Doctor clapped his hands twice, sharply, and a young native woman wearing a crisp, spotlessly white dress shuffled into the room carrying a tray with a pitcher of water and several small bowls of sliced fruit. The woman’s eyes were wide and blank. She did not respond to the Drakes when they thanked her. She just continued staring straight ahead. After setting down the tray and pouring glasses of water for both of them, she turned and shuffled slowly out the door.  
“I don’t think she even blinked once!” observed Diana.  
“Odd.”  
Standing at the window, which was a barely more than a rectangular hole punched through the thick stone wall, deep enough to sit in, Diana observed Dr. Graham in the courtyard talking with the young African doctor, whom she supposed to be Dr. Wei. The latter nodded and gestured toward a group of men who shuffled along after him out the gate. The men moved stiffly. They were carrying machetes.  
Diana shivered and turned back to her husband. Ronald was still grinning as he examined the stonework of the walls. He seemed delighted with the old fort-turned-medical clinic, but the thick, dank walls seemed to close in on her. To her, the place still felt very much like the prison it had been during the days of the slave trade.

While the Drakes waited for Dr. Wei and his troop to return, they were offered fresh clothing. Ronald was given one of the Director’s own suits, which was crisp and white and far too big for Drake’s wiry frame. It hung comically loose from his shoulders making him look rather like a little boy trying to dress up in his father’s clothes. Diana was given a dress that belonged to the clinic’s secretary. It too was white, but the fabric was soft and clingy and was soon plastered to her curves by her own sweat.  
The Doctor joined them, face wrapped with fresh white bandages and wearing a crisp white suit that looked far better on him than the one on Ronald Drake. Even the dwarf who waddled and strutted around the table, snapping orders to the dull-eyed servers who brought their food wore an impeccably tailored white suit.   
The only person at the table who was not dressed in white was a tall, broad-shouldered man with a sad face who shuffled up and seated himself without a word. He was dressed in black pants with a somber, charcoal-gray shirt.  
“This is Dan.” Said the Doctor, by way of introduction. “He was visiting the region…and contracted a rare tropical illness which I have been treating. You see, this is a research clinic. I have been studying the Sleeping Sickness that ravages the villages along the coast, looking for a cure. Without much success I fear. Most of the men and women you see around the clinic are patients I am treating. I have been able to rouse quite a number of the afflicted, but they don’t always regain their senses. Many of them are like…sleepwalkers. They can hear and understand, obey simple instructions, but the vital spark seems to have gone out of them and I have not been able to rekindle it. Dan here is one of my triumphs. Why, when Dan first arrived here, you would have sworn, by all appearances, that he was dead. Isn’t that right, Dan?”  
“Dead.” He replied in a sepulchral monotone.  
“But he has been responding to the thermo-electric therapy I’ve been trying and has shown great improvement. I have great hopes for our friend Dan!”  
The Doctor gazed proudly at his star patient, for a slightly uncomfortable time.  
Dan stared fixedly at his dinner plate.  
The dinner that was served was a bit Spartan, local fish and tinned beef served over rice. But there was more fruit and a bit of cheese and mounds of the local flatbread, dark and strong—not entirely unlike pumpernickel in flavor.  
The wine, however, was superb.  
“You know, Doctor, it is rather remarkable that we stumbled upon you and your little clinic. You see, we came here looking for a friend of ours, a Doctor, who also specializes in medical research. He’s an Astro-Chemist though. Always talking about the healing powers of the sun and radiations and exotic isotopes and such. It’s really all quite beyond me, but for a time he was acknowledged as the leading man in his field.”  
“Oh? What is the name of your friend? I may know him, or of him. We of the medical profession are still thin on the ground here in the jungle—and we do tend to sort of keep track of each other.”  
“Dr. Felix Benet.” Answered Diana.  
“I do recall hearing the name.” said the Doctor as he sliced the beef on his plate, carefully dissecting it into small portions before eating any bite of it. “There was a bit of a scandal, was there not?”  
“Yes, deuced bad luck and some very nasty business!”  
“Doctor Benet,” Ronald continued, talking around a steady stream of bites. “Worked with a radioactive isotope, Radium X—they called it, which was discovered by Diana’s husband. Her first husband that is.”  
Diana frowned and blushed a bit.  
“Looked like a miracle cure for all sorts of ailments for a while, but the stuff turned out to be toxic. Caused terrible deformities, drove Diana’s husband mad before…it killed him.”  
“Ronald!” murmured Diana, shifting uncomfortably. “I really wish you wouldn’t…”  
Her husband, warming up for a rousing story however, barely noticed her as he plunged on. Dan stopped pushing his food around and looked toward her, reacting in some dim way to the distress in her voice.  
Undeterred by his wife’s objection and spurred on by the very obvious interest that the Doctor was taking in his tale, Ronald Drake related the entire incredible story of Janos Rukh’s discovery, the expedition to find it, how the radioactive rock had poisoned Janos and his obsession with it drove he and Diana apart. He glossed over the romance that blossomed between himself and Diana Rukh—muttering “all that stuff is laid out in torrid detail in my aunt’s book.” But he went into great detail about the weapon Rukh had made using Radium X, an invisible ray that melted stone and metal like butter, but was no more deadly than Rukh’s poisonous touch, the murders of the other members of the expedition, his own aunt and her husband, and how Doctor Benet had seemingly sacrificed himself in the trap they’d laid for Janos Rukh—who had died horribly himself, and the wonderful potential that Benet’s Radium X treatments had initially shown.”  
“Fascinating!” declared the Doctor with a clap of his hands.   
“Now I am certain that I have heard of this friend of yours. A man fitting the description you have so eloquently provided has been staying at the Imperial hotel in the district capital. They say that he is a doctor, but that he rarely leaves his rooms at the hotel, and that he drinks long into the night and talks to visitors that are not there. He is a very troubled man.”  
Ronald nodded gravely.  
“He is our friend and we cannot leave him to rot alone in the jungle, no matter how awful his mistakes have been. Diana and I came here hoping to find him and rescue him from his shame. Or at least to cheer him up a bit and remind him that he has dear friends who care about him!”  
“To Dear Friends!” said the Doctor, raising his glass for a toast.  
“Besides,” said Ronald in a now conspiratorially soft tone, “With all this talk of war on the Continent, I hope to rediscover the Radium X deposit and perhaps mine it to take back to Britain. After all, it may have proven to be a failure for medicine, but it does make a fantastic and terrible weapon. Wouldn’t want that to fall into the wrong hands!”  
“No. No we wouldn’t.” said the Doctor with a secret smile.  
With that the dinner was ended and the diners rose to retire for the evening.  
“Ronny,” hissed Diana while still smiling for their host, “You are a fool. You are an utter fool!”  
And with that she pulled her arm from his and stamped off to the guest quarters they had been given.  
Bewilderment and pain was written over his face as he stumbled after her.   
“What?” he asked with almost child-like innocence.

“Dan,” The Doctor said almost patting his patient on the shoulder, but pulling his hand away at the first vicious snap of static. “I believe we may have found a way around our voltage problem.”  
“Napoleon, fetch Lady Steven’s book will you?” I believe you will find it among the other literary rubbish in the staff lounge. As I recall, she gave very precise descriptions of their travels. Let’s see if we can match those up with a map and get an idea where this remarkable Radium X can be found.”

Later that night.  
The Doctor sat in his study pouring over a copy of Lady Steven’s final work, published posthumously to great acclaim, At the Mountains of the Moon: A True Tale of Jungle Romance, pausing from time to time to jot down notes.  
“…’the natural passions of healthy young animals’…Indeed.”  
He pinched the bridge of his nose and rubbed at his eyes. With a sigh he reached for the bottle of moisturizing eye drops on the table.  
“The things I do for Science.”


	9. Unquiet Night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Little Francis finds Stranger Danger in the Haunted Castle

UNQUIET NIGHT

After dinner the Drakes were shown to the room Dr. Wei and “Tulip” had prepared for them. It was an odd curved room that hugged the seaward side of the Castillo’s main keep. The two ends of the room were out of sight of each other, hidden by the curve of the inner wall. Dr. Wei had three single beds, barely more than cots, with flat straw-stuffed mattresses hauled up to the room from one of the wards, to be positioned as the family wished. There was a heap of clean sheets, folded and piled on one of the beds. Other than the narrow beds, the only furniture in the room was a single rather battered looking rattan chair and a low writing desk that, at one time, must have been varnished but which was now mostly bare wood-grain with darker brown flecks and streaks scattered across its surface.  
All of the Drakes’ trunks and cases were stacked neatly against the wall.  
“Homey!” proclaimed Ronald with a grin.  
“Better than sleeping in the sand on the beach.” Diana allowed, grudgingly.  
Her husband hugged her tightly and nibbled her ear.  
The excitement of the past day had clearly roused his passions. He was full of rowdy energy, like a little boy just seconds from misbehaving.  
She pretended not to notice as his fingers plucked eagerly at the buttons on her blouse. He leaned heavily into her, pressing himself against her hips from behind.  
Diana feigned indifference as she spread sheets on the beds and laid out a lacey, sheer nightgown. For later. She replied to his hot whispers in her ear with non-committal grunts and chuckles. But she was breathing hard before she finished laying out the bed clothes.  
By unspoken agreement two of the beds were shoved side by side at one end of the room. The remaining bed was tucked into the opposite side, behind the curve of the wall, out of sight.  
A salty sea breeze blew through square windows, high on the outside wall.  
Francis lie sprawled across his little bed unable to sleep. He’d kicked the sheet off him minutes after being tucked in.   
He chewed his lip with a very serious toddler’s pout.  
His parents were playing Jungle again. He could hear them, though they tried to be quiet. They made strange animal noises that he found disturbing, as if they were hurting each other.   
He squirmed and frowned.   
The rusted springs of their beds squeaked and squealed like angry mice.  
After a while they finished their game. They whispered and giggled for a long time afterward. Just as Francis was beginning to doze off, they went back to playing Jungle again.  
Francis sighed.  
Eventually they wore each other out and fell soundly asleep. His father snored loudly. His mother snored too, but more lightly and with a faintly musical tone that Francis found relaxing.  
Quite unexpectedly there was a metallic clunk from the door, set at the apex of the inward wall’s curve. There was a click. Then the door swung slightly, silently open. Peeking around the bend of the wall Francis could see a long, narrow crack of blackness. Something moved on the other side.  
Francis began to shiver. His teeth chattered softly, despite the muggy heat of the tropical night.  
A long, stick-thin brown arm reached in through the open crack of the door. Slender fingers with long nails pointed at Francis. The fingers trembled unsteadily. The hand beckoned to him.  
Francis didn’t move a muscle.  
The door slowly, quietly swung a little further open.  
Now the boy could see a woman standing on the other side.  
She was skinny, dressed in a dingy white smock of some kind, a hospital gown. Her skin was very darkly brown. Her hair was combed straight and tied tightly in a bun. Her eyes were wide and bright and never blinked. She smiled a thin, sweet smile and beckoned the boy once more.  
He wasn’t frightened of her now that he could see her. She was so skinny, so fragile-looking, that it didn’t seem likely that she could be dangerous in any way. More curious than frightened now, Francis slid out of bed and tip toed to the door.  
The lady smiled wider, baring yellowish white teeth with only a few gaps. She reached down and took his hands. Her fingers were hard like sticks and very cold. She gently tugged until Francis followed her out the door. She turned and together they began to shuffle down the curved hallway that wound around the castle’s keep.  
“Where are we going?” Francis asked.  
The lady looked down at him with her glittering, unblinking eyes.  
She smiled and laid one finger over her lips.  
The little boy shrugged and allowed himself to be pulled along.  
They walked for a long time, or so it seemed to the boy.  
They went down a wide set of stairs and through several empty rooms.  
Finally they came to a long rectangular room outside of the keep itself and in one of the squat, boxy buildings that connected to it.  
Standing in the doorway, Francis now saw that there were a dozen or more people on beds lining the sides of the room. The room stank of unwashed bodies, sweat and pee and bleach used to mop the floors not quite often enough.  
Francis wrinkled his nose in disgust.  
The people in the beds, men and women, young and old, were all sitting up stiffly. On some silent cue, they all turned their heads in unison to stare at Francis with wide, unblinking eyes.  
They all smiled. Too widely. With too many teeth.  
A low keening moan began to rise from the people on the beds. Several began to chatter their teeth wordlessly.  
The woman holding his hand let out a whistlely, wheezy giggle and tried to pull Francis with her into the room.  
The boy would have none of that!  
He had no idea just what was going on, but he was sure it wasn’t good.   
He kicked the skinny, giggling woman in the shin, bit down on the hand holding his own, hard. Her skin tasted bitter and dusty. With a yank he pulled free and scurried away, running as fast as his little legs could carry him.  
The skinny woman howled in misery and collapsed on the floor, shaking and shivering in some sort of fit. Her eyes rolled up in their sockets until only red-brown stained whites were showing.  
The people on the beds began to flail about wildly. A loud, mournful keening broke out among them.  
Francis ran away, tearing through room after room, speeding down hallways, outdoors, across a courtyard, through more doors until he found a large square ventilation shaft that tunneled through thick stone walls. Dropping down on all fours he crawled inside. He wailed like a banshee until he found himself curled up, panting, out of breath, hiding in the darkness inside the fortresses ancient walls.

The screams of her child, even muffled by distance, were enough to wake Diana from a sound sleep. Her eyes snapped open. Her whole body ached from recent exertions. She listened, unsure that she had really heard what she thought she’d heard. Ronald snored serenely beside her.  
“Wake up!” she shouted once.  
In seconds she was up, pulling a night gown over her bare skin, and was out the door, which stood ajar.  
“whassamatter?’ Mumbled Ronald, feeling for her warmth in the suddenly cool bed.  
The only reply was the slap of Diana’s bare feet as she raced away, toward the sound of her son’s screams.  
Moments later, Ronald Drake came bounding out of their room, pulling pants up with one hand, holding a Webly revolver in the other.


	10. Diana Finds the Zombies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The mother stumbles on to a horrifying secret in the basement of the castle.

DIANA FINDS THE ZOMBIES

Trailing streamers of filmy nightgown like gauze wings, Diana followed the pattering of her son’s footsteps out into the mustering ground courtyard at the center of the fortress. She turned in frantic circles, trying to spot him, but saw nothing other than a door slowly swinging shut to her left. Racing to the door, she wrenched it open, and then hesitated when she saw the steep stairs winding down into inky blackness, into cellars deep below the fortifications. A sudden scream, muffled and distant, echoed out of the darkness. She gathered up the hem of her nightgown, hiking it to mid-thigh then plunged down the stairs.  
The stairway wound down, running into narrow stone corridors that twisted and branched out into a dark maze. Dull yellow bulbs hung from wires bolted to the bare rock walls, casting small pools of jaundiced light. Diana ran through the corridors, calling to her son, but heard nothing but the echoes of her own voice ringing back out of the dark. She found room after room filled with strange equipment, shelves full of chemicals and various supplies in sealed crates. She grabbed a flashlight from a table strewn with old papers and bound journals.  
She stumbled half by accident into a long rectangular room with a curved ceiling, bone dry and full of dust, probably an old gunpowder magazine. The walls were cold to the touch, the floor icy beneath her bare feet, but the air was stale and hot. Dust in the air mingled with the tang of old gunpowder, a nose-curling medicinal smell and a faint hint of the odor of spoiled meat. She pushed the door fully open, allowing pale yellow light from the hall into the room. With a gasp she saw the bodies of native men and women, stacked shoulder high, like cordwood along the walls on either side. The bare feet jutting out at her all had two tangs on the toes. One was a date from six months to two years in the past. The other tag bore a date that hadn’t arrived yet. There was no sound, no movement, but she believed that the wide, glassy eyes could see her, that she was being watched, that silent voices were crying out to her.  
Suddenly she heard a blood curdling shriek from across the room. Remembering the flashlight in her hand, she thumbed it on and swept the beam in that direction. The harsh white light fell upon a short figure crouching between the stacks of bodies. The face was covered with a grotesquely carved wooden mask with a snarling fanged mouth and scowling eyes. In either hand, the figure carried a native fly whisk, long wooden handles with strands of coarse hair bound at the tops. As she watched, the figure shrieked again, then broke into a high-pitched hyena laugh and came racing toward her, whisks flailing wildly about.   
Diana screamed as she wheeled about and ran from the room. She careened through the twisting corridors, bouncing from wall to wall like a lace-shrouded rubber ball to finally stumble shins-first onto the stairs leading to the courtyard above. She looked back to see the masked figure stalking silently toward her. She screamed again and tumbled up the steps until she spilled out, sobbing, into Drake’s arms.  
“Good Lord, Diana! What’s wrong? Where’s Francis?’  
She gasped incoherently and gestured with rigid fingers down at the dark staircase.  
In the darkness below, Napoleon the dwarf shrunk back into the shadows and removed his wooden mask. Fist pressed tightly against his lips, he stifled a laugh, half choking on giggles, before he slunk stealthily away from the stairs and disappeared through a door into a storeroom.


	11. Lost Boy Found

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A stranded explorer finds an unlikely native guide.

LOST BOY FOUND

Through empty corridors and dark rooms, the crying of a child could be heard. His plaintive voice called out for his parents. When only silence answered, he broke into pitiable wailing.  
Following the sound, a dark shape scurried through secret passages in the walls, scuttling like a crab through raised grates and sliding phantom-like through barely cracked hidden doors.  
In a dusty, unused chamber, the Drake boy sat crying on bare flagstones. A nearly dead flashlight lies on the floor next to him. Something he’d picked up in his mad dash through darkened rooms. The dirty yellow light from its dying bulb too weak to provide any visibility, it flickered on and off like a torch guttering out. The only real light was cast by the moon through a slit of a window high up the outer wall. Seagulls crouched in it, peering down at the lost child like bleached vultures gathering for a meal.  
The dwarf raised a grill and waddled into the room. He stood staring at the child speculatively, head cocked slightly to one side.  
“Why are you crying?” he asked at length.  
The child jumped, startled by the unexpected voice. He stifled a sob while looking over his new found companion.  
“I was exploring, but I got lost and now I can’t find my Mommy or Daddy! I keep hearing them but I can’t find them!”  
The dwarf chuckled at some secret joke, then patted the boy’s shoulder.  
“Don’t cry! Explorers don’t cry.”  
“That’s what Daddy says, but I’m lost and I’m scared and…”  
“Tut-tut-tut! You say you’re lost? Why is that?”  
“I don’t know where I am!”  
“If you knew where you were, you wouldn’t be exploring would you?”  
The boy thought about it and nodded, the beginnings of a tentative smile on his lips.  
“So, since you don’t know where you are, you are an explorer! Now me, I know where I am, so I can’t be an explorer like you.”  
The dwarf sounded a little said as he said this, a little wistful and regretful at the same time.  
“But!” he said with a dramatic finger pointing up, “ I can be your native guide! Would you like that?”  
The boy smiled and nodded. Napoleon took him by the hand and led him out of the room.

The Doctor, dressed in a velvet robe, bandages hanging in rather loose loops about his face, stood in the courtyard, trying to cajole the boy’s distraught parents. His eyes were gray and naked, dark glasses left on the bed stand when Diana’s screaming wakened him. Tears seeped from the edges of his lidless sockets, soaking into the linen strips over his cheeks.  
“Please, Mrs. Drake, calm yourself. We will find the boy!”  
“When? How?”  
Diana’s arms flailed in helpless half circles.  
“We expect every cooperation from you and your…staff!” growled Ronald Drake, aggressively protective as he wrapped his arms around his shivering wife.  
“Of course! Of course!”  
The Doctor’s tone was conciliatory, but his eyes glittered dangerously sharp, clearly annoyed at Drake’s attitude.  
Before the argument could escalate any further, Napoleon the dwarf and little Francis Drake showed up, hand in hand. The boy was smiling.  
“See, Bwana? We have round your base camp! We’re saved!”  
The boy giggled gleefully.  
“Mommy! Daddy!”  
He raced to hug his parents. Diana kneeled to embrace him and glared angrily at the dwarf, who had taken a step or two toward the boy.  
“Keep away from him, you little monster!”  
Napoleon shrunk back, mouth open to protest, hand raised in mock astonishment. Diana’s eyes locked on his as a harsh and bitter understanding passed unspoken between the two of them.  
Drake stepped toward the Doctor, fists clenched.  
“You keep your…creature away from my son!”  
The Doctor scowled, first at Drake, then at his miniature servant.  
“Do not fear, Mr. Drake. Napoleon will never come near your boy again!”  
The dwarf flustered, still trying to protest.  
“But…”  
“You. Come with me, now!”  
The Doctor turned and strode away. Napoleon scurried to keep up with him.  
“You’ve gone too far with your little cruelties this time.” The master hissed.  
Outraged by the suspicions leveled at him, Napoleon stammered and sputtered, trying to come out with an explanation or a protest, but the Doctor continued to stomp away.  
He cast one last look back at the Drakes, now wallowing in their shared embrace. The parents scowled angrily back at him. The boy, looking happy and clueless to the interactions going on between the adults, smiled and waved.  
With a sigh Napoleon waddled back to the darkness that had become the only home, the only embrace he knew.


	12. Radium X Safari

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Immediately after the Drakes depart, the Doctor sets out to find and exploit the Radium X meteor.

RADIUM X SAFARI  
The Doctor waved cheerily as the launch bearing his assistant and the Drakes pulled away from the dock and chugged slowly into the river channel. A wide brown wake formed behind it, like coffee spilled into the murky green river water.  
“Good-bye, you smug, arrogant little fools!” he muttered under his breath as he smiled. “I hope the boat capsizes and crocodiles tear the flesh from your wretched bones!”  
He nodded and waved once more.  
Napoleon stood on his tip toes, nose and hands just over the crenellated battlements. He was chattering shocking obscenities in Portuguese toward the departing Britons.  
As soon as the boat shuddered its way out of sight up the river, he turned to his servant and ordered him to bring out the good boat and six of the most obedient and strong of the walking comatose.  
“I’ll bring Dan and see to the supplies.”

For the first leg of the journey the Doctor hired a steam launch to take them as far inland as the rivers would allow. Dan sat alone in a dark, cramped cabin brooding and oblivious to the stifling heat. The bearers crouched motionless between boxes of supplies and cages filled with live chickens. The Doctor sprawled comfortably in a deck chair under a canvas awning, sipping cocktails and reading journals while Napoleon fanned him with ostrich feathers. The boatmen who crewed the launch stayed to the rear of the boat, whispering frightenedly about their passengers.  
The boat traveled down a shallow muddy stream, so thick with weeds that it looks like they are floating across a an unkempt lawn. The sun was harsh overhead, blazing white in a cloudless blue sky. The jungle grew right to the banks of the steam and spilled over, hanging lush and drooping overhead. The dense foliage created solid-looking green walls to either side of the stream and the over-reaching branches soon begin to meet, roofing over the murky wallow. Every so often there was a break in the wall of vegetation, like a dark muddy brown door that opened on a trail that tunneled like a worm hole into the jungle. Deep inside those dark openings eyes glinted, watching the boat glide by. Some might be human, but most certainly are not.  
One night, while the Doctor and his dwarf slept in a cabin, one of the boatmen, driven by curiosity, tip toed along the narrow ledge of the boat. He crouched down to peer in through the glass port that is never open. There he saw Dan, dressed in his rubber insulating suit, sitting on the edge of a narrow bunk, staring toward the port. The boatman saw Dan’s stiff whitened hair, chalk-white face creased and mournful. Unblinking eyes, dull and glassy but with the occasional glimmer within, as if something were trying to break free, like a swimmer trapped beneath the ice of those frozen orbs, desperate for breath, stared back. As the boatman stared in horror, Dan’s eyes locked upon him. A twitch crawled horribly beneath skin that flickered with a blue-white inner light. With a hoarse, rasping voice Dan spoke.  
“I…killed him.”  
The boatman screamed in terror, turned and dove off the boat into crocodile infested waters. He was almost instantly set upon by lurking crocs and torn to pieces long before he could reach the bank, just a couple of yards away.

Finally, unable to push any deeper into water that had become more mud than stream, the Doctor and his party unloaded at a jungle ford, where the banks blended seamlessly into the mire and both had been churned up by dozens of gouged footprints. As soon as the last of the boxes was handed down to a blank-eyed bearer, the Doctor, dressed in tropical khakis, limbs and face covered with bandages that are soon stained with seepage, led them off down a twisting jungle path. As they trooped deeper into the jungle, the dwarf sometimes stumbled and raced to keep up with the Doctor, but often rode on the shoulders of one of the pack bearers—all of whom seemed oblivious to the additional weight of his squirming body on their backs. Dan carried a heavy trunk over his shoulder and though he occasionally stumbled as he plods along, following the Doctor, he showed no sign of effort or weariness. The pack bearers walked until they are told to stop, then they collapsed on to the ground, sinking down as if settling into their graves.


	13. The Electric Man vs The Mad Ape

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A fierce jungle beast attacks the Doctor's expedition, to its great misfortune.

THE ELECTRIC MAN VS THE MAD APE

Slogging overland through dense jungle for several days, the expedition entered a mountainous area. Jagged stony peaks, slopes furry with green rose up out of ragged white clouds of continuous drizzling rain. The expedition’s path wound along forested crests high above dense pits of impenetrable vines and tree-tops. Dan wore a wide-brimmed rubberized hat to keep the rain off his skin, but still there was an almost constant snap and sizzle as droplets brushed against his electrified face. He blinked at sudden sharp flashes which cracked like bullwhips and threw white sparks off his cheeks like streams of electric tears. He soon grew sluggish and weary, his electrical strength siphoned off one spark at a time. He lost current and turned gaunt, as if from internal bleeding.  
In a native village, near the far edge of the mountain range, a group of white men, anthropologists, waited in an abandoned market, surrounded by empty houses. Drizzling rain pattered down around them, heavy fog shrouded the jungle beyond in milky white swirls and roiling banks. The fog flowed like a slow motion river between the trees, cascading down hillsides and over cliffs, an airy and insubstantial ghost of a waterfall.  
Talking amongst themselves, the rangy, whip-thin leader said, “I don’t care what the natives say about them. It’s our duty to warn them about the Beast. We can’t let them wander into its territory without knowing the danger.”  
Another stouter man with wide white whiskers on his cheeks shrugged. “I’m here, ain’t I? I’m just saying that the drums have been talking about this lot for days now. The drums say that they ain’t normal folk. They’re ghosts, every last one of them.”  
“Bah!”  
Just then, the Doctor, face wrapped in bandages, eyes covered by dark glasses, strode out of the fog into the opening. Dan stumbled out after him. His face was turned down, hidden beneath the flapping rubber brim of his hat. There was a faint humming, crackling sound coming from him and steam drifted in streamers behind him. He looked up once, face grim, agonized, eyes glassy and red. His skin was chalk white like a bled corpse. The bearers came next, impassive, eyes staring, shambling stiffly under loads that should be too heavy to be borne upon human shoulders. Their bodies glistened slick and dark in the wet mist.  
The two men looked at each other, the first in consternation and surprise, the second smiling knowingly and nodding toward the bizarre troupe approaching them.  
“Well? Go on, then! Tell them about the Beast like you’re all determined to do.”  
The first man stood stock still, mouth agape, a faint sheen of chill sweat beading on his brow.  
The Doctor paused a few steps from him, head tilted quizzically to one side. “Why yes, tell me about this Beast of yours!” he said in a light, jovial tone.   
Dan and the bearers stumbled to a halt.  
The wiry anthropologist coughed and faltered for a few seconds. “Well…it’s just that…well, the natives say there’s a wild beast—a rogue ape of some kind. It’s been terrorizing the area for weeks now. Killed several of the hunters, you see. We’ve heard …”  
“Through the drums!” noted the other.  
“That your…expedition is headed up into the Mountains of the Moon, and that’s the very place the killer ape is supposed to be wandering about. It just didn’t seem right to let you go up there without some sort of a warning.”  
The Doctor nodded. “That’s very civil of you, sir. Very civil indeed! Thank you.”  
The tall man swallowed hard. “Then are you going to delay going up into the mountains? Until the beast is caught or killed or wanders off, that is?”  
“Oh, no! We’ll press on as planned.” He sounded completely self-assured, almost exaggeratedly casual. He looked around at the empty buildings. “What happened to the natives? We were going to ask around, get some directions from the men who worked with an earlier expedition several years ago. Did every one leave the village? Fleeing this wild ape of yours/”  
The stout, whiskered man snorted and shook his head. “No sir. They all left on account of you!”  
“Me?”  
The first man, blushing slightly with embarrassment nodded. “They seem to have gotten the notion in their heads that you were all ghosts, the walking undead.”  
“That’s what the drums say.”  
“How delightful!” he laughed. To Dan and the bearers, “You hear that? The natives think we’re all ghosts, walking deadmen!” there was something unpleasant about his laugh.  
Dan whispered one word in a hoarse, sepulchral voice. “Ghosts.”  
The bearers stared straight ahead, not blinking or resting, standing stock still with their packs still upon their shoulders.  
The other white men with the two lead anthropologists grumbled amongst themselves and edged farther away.  
The tall man frowned worriedly. “Then, at least tell me that you’re carrying plenty of guns. To protect yourselves from…animals and such.”  
“Oh, no. I rather dislike firearms.” The Doctor said. He slapped the pistol on his belt. “This is the only one we’ve got.”  
“Dear Lord, man! You can’t go up there without decent rifles for protection!”  
“We will be perfectly safe. Don’t worry.”  
With an airy wave of his hand, the Doctor motioned for his band to start moving again. “If there’s no one here to ask directions from, we might as well press on and get as far as we can before nightfall. I thank you for your concern and your courtesy.”  
The strange expedition shuffled through the empty village, slushing through the mud and puddles. They shambled past the cringing anthropologists and disappeared into the forest, vanishing as one after another was swallowed by the fog.  
“Perhaps we will meet again!” shouted the Doctor’s voice, echoing eerily out of the mists.  
“God. I hope not!” whispered the stocky man. The others murmured in agreement.

The Doctor’s expedition set up camp in a clearing on the side of a hill. A fire crackled angrily as Napoleon prodded it with a stick, forcing it to a fitful, snapping blaze despite the damp air around it. The bearers sat in a circle around the fire, backs to the jungle. They ate hot gruel cooked in an iron pot over the fire, scooping it out of the boiling pot with bare hands. Nearby, the Doctor had set up a field generator and recharging poles inside a tent to recharge Dan’s current. The gas-fed generator rumbled and sputtered angrily, while the portable coils discharge. From outside, the tent flashes of artificial lighting flickered and turned the canvas translucent as hissing bolts flew from the poles into Dan’s outstretched hands.  
Something watched from the trees. First, in the darkness, there was just the coarse rasp of its breath, shaking the leaves in hot gusts. Then, gnarled black fingers, shaggy with hair reached out and quietly parted the foliage. Black eyes glittered evilly. Yellow fangs bared in a snarling mouth. Hints of foam flecked the corners of the beast’s mouth.   
Suddenly, the ape charged out and pounced upon one of the men on the ground, beating him with huge hairy fists. Screaming the beast picked up the battered body and bent it double in the air over its head. Then it cruelly grabbed each limb and twisted it, bones cracking like dry sticks. The ape’s hoots sounded like laughter. It dropped the broken man who made no sound and as he lay upon the ground, eyes staring passively up at his tormentor, it was clear that he was still alive and aware.  
Dan stumbled out of the tent, his face and hands glowing. With a grimace and snarl he lurched at the ape and the two meet in a fierce grapple. The beast stiffened as blue-glowing hands worked into its black hair, setting patches on fire. Dan, heedless of blows to his head and shoulders that should have shattered bone, but had no effect on his electro-charged flesh, finally reached the skin beneath the beast’s fur and suddenly the ape shuddered. Its eyes rolled up into its head, foam poured from its mouth and nostrils, then it fell limp and dead to the ground.  
The Doctor walked over and smiled at Dan, standing triumphant and grimacing over the dead ape.  
“Not so fearsome a beast after all. Hard to believe all the fuss that was made over it.”  
The man attacked by the mad ape let out a rattling cough, eyes still unblinking and staring up, reflected momentarily in the dark glasses over the Doctor’s eyes.  
“Him too.” He said to Dan as he walked off.  
Dan lurched over to the fallen bearer.  
Looking up through eyes that could not close, something inside the broken body whimpered as a chalk-white face, grimacing with agonized grief looms over it. A hand reached down and there was a flash and then darkness, and then…


	14. The Last Radium X Mine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Doctor plunders an ancient crater.

THE LAST RADIUM X MINE  
Eventually, they reached the site of the Radium X meteor’s crater, locating it mostly by Drake’s detailed accounts in magazines and Lady Arabella’s lurid tropical romance novel. What she no doubt believed to be nothing more than a picturesque reverie concerning the shapes of the peaks of the Mountains of the Moon proved to be an accurate rendering of the location of the previous expedition’s camp, and a crucial clue to the actual location of the Radium X deposit.  
Camp was set up. The Doctor relaxed in a comfortable pavilion complete with folding canvas chairs and an icebox for chilling his drinks. Dan spent most of the first day standing between the upright poles of the portable recharger. Electrical current streamed from round copper balls atop the twin rods in crackling, writhing bolts to the collar Dan wore around his neck. The “juicing up” continued until Dan’s face glowed a hot blue-white so intense that it hurt the eyes to look at directly.  
Once the Electrical Man was fully charged, The Doctor directed him toward a field rigged pulley contraption assembled over the smoking, hissing crater-hole which contained the Radium X splinters of a long dead meteorite. The Doctor and his servant watched from a distance, safe behind lead aprons and bulky metal masks. Napoleon’s was painted to look like a native medicine mask with snarling mouth and jagged streaks.  
“The radiation would soon kill any of the rest of us.” The Doctor explained. “But his body is already so saturated with electrical energy that the radiation cannot penetrate or damage him. He is immune to those poisonous invisible rays!”  
Dan spent the next few days tirelessly chopping hissing, sparking flecks of Radium X out of the sides of the crater. He didn’t rest or sleep or need to stop for water or food. Rarely he tugged on the guide-wire and was pulled up to stumble back to the portable generator and recharging poles, to bath once more in artificial lighting. Most of the particles of Radium X were smaller than a fingernail but were easy to spot, glowing green and sending out snapping sparks upon contact with the air. After days of work, the entire lode, all of the splinters of ancient meteor that were lodged in the rocky skin of the Earth, had been mined out and sealed in heavy metal boxes.  
Once he was satisfied that they had recovered as much as could be found, the Doctor called Dan back and had him wiped down to remove toxic dust and residual radiation. Charges were planted all around the crater and on the rocky slopes above it. The charges were detonated, causing the crater to collapse in on itself and an avalanche of thousands tons of rock rushed down over it, forever burying the site of the crater and irrevocably altering the shape of the hillside until it no longer bore any resemblance to its original appearance. The Doctor was confident that no one would be able to locate the crater and even if they could identify the radically changed location, they would never be able to dig deep enough to find any Radium X.  
“If the nations of the world seek Radium X, either to heal or to destroy, they will have no choice but to come to me! They will pay me dearly for the scraps I choose to share with them! I will soon become both the wealthiest and the most powerful man on the planet!”  
His laughter, tinged with more than a hint of madness rang out over the jungle and terrified fierce animals. Creatures who have never before experienced fear found themselves cringing and slinking into the shadows, squeezing their eyes shut until the echoes of that laugh die out.


	15. Rukh Finds Benet

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Janos Rukh confronts the man he believes betrayed him, with deadly intent.

RUKH FINDS BENET  
The Grande Colonial Hotel loomed over the beach and the rolling black waves like a mausoleum. Stark white-washed walls with black wrought-iron balconies and rows of pillars like a forest of denuded ghost trees faced the packed earth road that wound past it. The windows were high and arched at the top, covered over with filmy white mosquito netting that rippled in the sea breezes like spider webs. All the windows were dark save for one, from which spilled a fuzzy white glow, almost lost in the layers of mosquito net and pale against the brightness of the full moon.  
The sole lit window belonged to the room of Dr. Felix Benet. The room was long and narrow but had a high arched ceiling. The bamboo blades of a ceiling fan chopped lazily at humid, muggy air, swirling it around but doing little to cool the room. The furniture in the room, which looked small huddled under the lofty walls and distant ceiling, combined light-weight tropical frames of rattan with embroidered over-stuffed cushions—a distinctly Colonial Victorian style. The floor was littered with discarded cigarettes, most barely half-smoked. The bed was a rumpled, little-used mess of linen sheets under a cone of mosquito netting, like a see-through pyramid abandoned by its restless pharaoh.   
Dr. Benet, an older gentleman with a broad, round face and high forehead, sat slumped in one of the rattan chairs. He had slick black hair in a widow’s peak and a Van Dyke beard jutted cantankerously from his chin. With one hand he mopped a sheen of sweat from the top of his head with an already soaked white cloth and with the other absent mindedly tugged at his wrinkled and unbuttoned khaki shirt. A pith helmet hung from the antlers of an antelope’s head, nailed to the wall, mercifully covering the animal’s dead marble eyes. His face was careworn and sagging with fatigue. There were dark circles under his eyes, which stared blankly past the room around him to distant mistakes and unbearable shame.  
With one languid, long-fingered hand he poured a clear stream of gin into a glass, set the bottle on the floor and swept the glass to his lips to drink –all in one fluid, well-practiced gesture.

Downstairs, a figure wrapped in black stalked across the parquetted floor of the darkened lobby. Despite the humid night heat, he wore a black coat and a hat with a battered turned-down brim. A scarf was wrapped round the lower half of his face. Only glittering eyes under black brows were visible in the shimmering green glow that was his face. Slowly he crept up a winding staircase. Strange, twisted black shadows crawled over the walls and ceiling, cast from the eerie green glow of his flesh.   
Inside Benet’s room, the doctor is roused from his reverie by a hissing sound from the suite’s outer door. Molten metal runs like syrup from the key hole, scorching and scoring the hard teak door. With a slight pop the lock finally dies and the door swings open.  
Benet raised one eyebrow as a grim black figure crossed the doorway and strode into his room, tugging the scarf from its face as it walked into the light. The shimmering glow of his visitor’s face died down to a chalky white, still faintly luminous and tinged green in the full light. Janos Rukh stood in Benet’s room, eyes glowering malevolently, lips stretched in a fierce snarl of a grin, baring white teeth.  
Benet’s other eyebrow rose and he nodded solemnly. He sipped gin from his glass, quite casually.  
“Oh. It’s you again.” He murmured.  
The Doctor raised his glass and nodded politely.  
“Come in. Have a drink.”  
His hand flowed up and glided open-palmed toward the bottle of gin.  
Rukh blinked and staggered back a step, triumphant grin sliding quickly from his face.  
“What’s wrong with you?” snarled Rukh. “Have you gone completely mad?”  
Benet smiled as if at a joke, eyes crinkling with glee.  
“Oh yes! Quite some time ago. Do not let that concern you. Please, make yourself comfortable.”  
Baffled, Rukh sunk into a chair and glared questioningly at the other man.  
“I’ve come to kill you, Dr. Benet. Surely you know that.”  
“Oh, yes, yes!” Hands fluttered in dismissal. “You usually do.”  
Benet grinned and tapped his chest.   
“And yet I am still here! You never seem quite able to get the job done.”  
He scowled darkly and shook his head.  
Rukh erupted out of his chair, crossed the room in one stride and smacked the glass from Benet’s hand with a vicious backhand swipe. He uttered a wordless growl of anger and shook his fist in Benet’s face.  
Shaken, Benet looked toward the corner where his glass lie in smashed shards on the floor, all the gin bled out in a dark puddle on the hardwood floor. He looked up at Rukh, his mouth hanging open in astonishment. Tentatively, he raised a hand and tapped lightly on Rukh’s chest. His brows rose in shock as he snapped his fingers back. He began to shake violently.  
“You are here!” he gasped. “Really…here. Alive!”  
Rukh grimaced angrily.   
“Yes Felix. I am…really..here…Alive!”   
He punctuated each word, beating his hand against his chest. With a sigh, Rukh wiped his brow, staggered back to a chair and sat down.  
“What amazes me, “He stared quizzically at Benet “Is that you are here, and still alive. I clearly remember killing you!”  
Benet squinted his eyes and nodded vigorously, as if at a private joke. He laughed out loud.  
“Oh, Janos!”   
He dabbed tears from his eyes with his handkerchief.  
“Surely you didn’t think I would set a trap, using myself as bait, without taking precautions?”  
Rukh growled at him, hands clenching into fists.  
“Rukh! Who invented the anti-toxin for Radium-X poisoning? The formula that you yourself took every day to counteract its deadly effect?”  
Benet shook his head, still chuckling.  
As realization dawned on Rukh, his eyes widened.  
Seeing that Rukh has figured it out, Benet nodded and laughed again, slapping his knee.  
“I administered the anti-toxin to myself an hour before the Symposium was scheduled to begin.”  
“You tricked me!”  
With a sympathetic expression, Benet nodded.   
“You allowed yourself to be tricked, Janos. Which shows you how much the Radium X poisoning had clouded your reason. Otherwise you would never have fallen for such a simple ruse.”  
Rukh smiled ruefully at the compliment.  
“You fell down ‘dead’ the moment I touched your hand. I never even paused to make sure that you were actually dead.”  
Benet laughed and nodded and poured more gin into another glass.   
“I may be a man of science, but I have the soul of an actor!”  
Rukh sighed and placed his hand over his eyes.  
“In any event, I’m too tired to kill you right now.”  
“That is good! For I am too tired to die. Tonight.”  
Rukh stared as Felix Benet poured gin into a glass and handed it toward him.  
“Perhaps tomorrow.” He growled, before sipping the proffered drink.  
“Perhaps tomorrow.” Agreed Benet.


	16. "Dr. Benet, I Presume!"

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Drakes arrive at their destination and look up an old friend.

“DR. BENET, I PRESUME”

The man in the pith helmet pushed through the vines and low branches that blocked his way.  
“Almost there!” He called over his shoulder. He grinned even with sweat pouring off his brow.  
The woman behind him grunted and struggled on. She also wore a pith helmet, jungle khakis, and shoes that were entirely inappropriate for the terrain in which she found herself. She yelped as her heel caught on the broken stone steps they were climbing and her ankle turned sharply.  
“Are you okay?” asked the man, concern cutting through his previously jovial mood.  
His wife glared at him and said something very unladylike. Her eyes glittered in the dappled light that filtered through the foliage overhead.   
The man chuckled.  
“You’re alright.”  
He extended his hand to help her up the last few cracked steps.  
She slapped his hand aside and forged on past him, smiling slightly when their sweat-soaked bodies pressed together on the narrow stairway. She heard the catch in his breath and swung her hips vindictively as she ascended the final steps.  
Diana Drake gasped with relief as she stepped out of the jungle-clogged stairs and onto the tiled patio of the colonial hotel. Her husband Ronald skipped to her side with a boyish grin. He kissed her quickly on the cheek, which she pretended to ignore.  
Together they walked arm-in-arm through the early morning crowd. The patio was awash with colorful tropical fabrics and crisp white cotton, punctuated by the khaki uniforms of soldiers. Fragile travelers and bureaucrats, not yet accustomed to the full brunt of life in the tropics were taking advantage of the not yet brutal sunshine. Hand fans, paper and silk, fluttered like the wings of overgrown butterflies, swarming beneath canopies and parasols. The clink of glasses and murmur of voices, sharp peals of laughter, were the sounds of a more comforting human jungle. For a few moments the Drakes paused like explorers lost in the wilderness, surveying their surroundings with hand-shaded eyes.  
“There he is!” exclaimed Diana, pointing excitedly. 

It took less than an hour of sitting on the hotel’s dining patio to remind Benet why he generally preferred not to leave the shelter of his room. Even early in the morning the sun was already blisteringly bright and the air was as thick and hot as a sauna, filled with the barnyard smells of a tropical city. Beyond the parapets of the patio, and the riotously flowered vegetation on the slopes below, rose the bleating of livestock and the shouting of men and the merciless blare of horns, whistles, and clanging of bells, all swelling in his ears and threatening to crack his hung-over skull wide open. Insects whined about, nipping at any exposed flesh. Under the shelter of a stiff canvas parasol, anchored in the center of his table, Felix Benet felt himself trapped in a sweltering hell.   
There was no ice in his glass, so even the gin and tonic he used to numb his headache was hot as motor oil. 

Diana waved but Benet did not see her. The doctor sat at a table on the fringe of the crowded patio, staring mournfully at the drink in front of him.  
Ronald and Diana hurried to his table, both smiling widely. With a dramatic flourish Ronald Drake planted himself in front of the doctor and whipped off his pith helmet.  
“Dr. Benet, I presume.”  
The older man looked up with a start, eyes widening as he recognized his visitors. Rather than smiling though, his first reaction was to glance nervously around, as if looking for someone else.  
Diana frowned at his appearance. A stray lock of oily black hair draped across his brow and there were dark circles under his red and bleary eyes. His face held a sickly pallor and was slick with sweat. The doctor looked deathly sick and as if he hadn’t slept in a very long time.  
“Drake! Diana!”  
Now his face crinkled with a wide smile, though his eyes still darted around, looking for something.  
“What an unexpected pleasure.” He absently brushed the stray lock of hair back and smoothed it into place with a trembling hand.  
“Surely you got our telegram?”  
From the baffled look on the doctor’s face Drake very much doubted that he had, or had read it if it had arrived on time.  
“Of course, of course.” Lied Benet smoothly. If he’d read any such telegram, he’d forgotten it in the gin-flavored haze where he spent his days.  
“I just did not expect you so soon.”  
“We’re later than expected.” Diana said, her tone mildly scolding. “We were ship-wrecked.”  
“It was marvelous!” blurted Ronald.   
Diana glared at him.  
“Well,” he added somewhat less enthusiastically, “It was certainly very interesting. We met the most peculiar fellow…”  
“It was terrifying and horrible and a grueling, nerve-wracking ordeal!” Diana interrupted.  
“Simply horrible.” Agreed her husband meekly.  
Doctor Benet smiled indulgently at the young couple, amused despite his apprehension.  
“You see the things one misses as a tropical hermit?”  
Diana dropped into the chair next to Benet and gently took his hand.  
“How are you, really?” she asked.  
Benet shrugged and patted her hand.  
“As well as can be expected.” He replied softly. “I have been taking my medication.” He raised his glass of gin in salute. “And the other, of course.” Patting a case in his shirt pocket.  
“That’s why we’re here, Old Man!” Drake said seriously.   
“The Home Office wants Ronald to rediscover the location of Meteor X.”  
Benet looked up with an unreadable expression.  
“The situation on The Continent is getting pretty tense. There’s talk of war. Even if they don’t plan to use Radium X themselves, the Ministry doesn’t want to risk it falling into the hands of…into the wrong hands.”  
Benet nodded, slumping wearily.  
“Ronald is the one they think stands the best chance of finding the crater, even if I’m the one who was actually there.” Diana’s face tightened angrily, possibly at the memory of her past confrontation with her then husband, Janos Rukh. “So he’s leading an expedition there. It’s sponsored, officially, by the Scientific Foundation, but secretly it’s being funded by the Ministry.”  
“They are right to be concerned.” Benet muttered under his breath. He stroked his beard with a trembling hand.  
Diana raised an eyebrow quizzically, but Benet waved the topic aside.  
“Will you be going with him?” Benet asked her, with a sudden look of alarm.  
“No…no. I’ll be staying near the coast. With Francis. I’ve had all the jungle I need for one lifetime, I assure you.”  
“You can never have too much jungle!” exclaimed Ronald.  
Diana shushed him.  
“And the jungle is no place for a young child. I will stay at Jan Browning’s hunting lodge while Ronald does all his slogging about and chopping through.”  
“What’s wrong, Felix.” She asked Benet, taking his hand with both of hers. “Won’t you tell me?”  
“Nothing. Nothing beyond that which is to be expected, dear lady.”   
He kissed her on the forehead.  
“It is a great pleasure to see the both of you again. I hope we have time for a proper dinner and a chance to talk more before your expedition leaves, Drake. But for now, you must excuse me. I am meeting someone, another old friend, concerning some very important unfinished business.”  
Somewhat befuddled, the Drakes stood when Dr. Benet did and after he gave them a sharp little bow, they made their goodbyes and left, walking into the hotel rather than returning by way of the rather treacherous stairway they had arrived through.   
“Is it just me, love, or did the doctor just dismiss us and send us packing like a couple of impertinent school children.” Asked Ronald, rather stunned.  
“”There is something very deeply wrong.” Diana agreed. “Something that Felix doesn’t want to say to the only friends who still haven’t forsaken him.”


	17. Breakfast With Benet

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mere moments after the Drakes depart, Dr. Benet meets with his expected guest.

BREAKFAST WITH BENET  
It took less than an hour of sitting on the dining patio to remind Benet why he generally preferred not to leave the shelter of his room. Even early in the morning the sun was already blisteringly bright and the air as thick and hot as a sauna, filled with the barnyard smells of a tropical city. The bleating of livestock in the streets, the shouting of men, and the merciless blare of horns, whistles and clanging bells all welled in his ears and threatened to crack his hangover weakened skull open. Insects buzzed and whined, nipping at any exposed flesh. Even under the shelter of a stiff canvas parasol anchored in the center of his table, Felix Benet felt himself trapped in a sweltering hell.  
There was no ice in his glass, so even the gin and tonic he used to numb his headache was hot as motor oil in an engine.   
A gaunt shape wrapped in a black cloak, battered hat, and fluttering scarf appeared at the edge of the patio, having climbed the outside stairs rather than passing through the shaded interior, where the dim light might have betrayed him. Rukh stalked across the patio toward Benet, careful not to pass within arm’s reach of any of the diners, snarling when a server with a tray veered too near. In a few seconds he stood beside Benet’s table and glared down at him with near molten eyes. A nervous tick tugged at the corner of one eye.  
Dr. Benet took a long sip of gin, then languidly extended a hand.  
Rukh smiled fiercely, baring white teeth, then grabbed Benet’s hand in a sudden jerky lunge.  
Benet winced at the fierceness of Rukh’s grip, and truthfully even with a fresh dose of Radium X counteractive in his veins the skin on his hand itched and burned at Rukh’s poisonous touch. After a few tense seconds, Benet raised an eyebrow and smiled indulgently.  
Rukh dropped his hand with a snarl and fell into a chair.  
“If you want to kill me, old friend, you will have to do it the old fashioned way. Perhaps you could wring my neck, eh?”  
Rukh glared.  
“We are not ‘friends’, Benet! And one day soon I may just wring your neck. I may indeed!”  
Rukh punctuated his threat with a jab of his finger.  
Under the searing African sun, Rukh’s skin looked pasty and white, but there was no hint of the eerie radioactive glow that was visible in darkness.  
“You may hate me, Janos, unjustly I insist, but you need me.”  
Rukh sneered, but seemed too tired to take the bait. He just continued to glare at Benet. Though, a hint of curiosity trickled into his eyes.  
“You need me, because nowhere else on Earth can you find this.”  
Benet reached into his sweat-soaked jacket and pulled out a black case. He unzipped it and carefully set it on the table. Inside was a syringe and three vials of a viscous, oily fluid. Tiny radiant flecks, smaller than grains of sand, roiled about inside the vials.  
“The counteractive?”  
Benet nodded.  
“Half my own supply. Enough to keep you alive for weeks. Enough to damp the fires that threaten to consume you from within.”  
Rukh stared at the vials for a long moment.  
“Not consume.” He said dully. “Nothing so clean as that. Radium X is no simple radiant poison. It is a devil, a violation of everything natural and sane. A little dose of it, like the second-hand doze you carry in your veins, will just kill you. Burn out your nerves. Melt the fragile jelly of your cells. But if you handle enough of it, if you hold it in your hand, if you let the unholy gleam of it into your eyes, it takes hold of you. Possesses you! Then you don’t burn away when its fires peak. Then you burn THROUGH, through the very skin of time and space. You find yourself in Hell itself. I can’t describe it to you, Benet. I can’t make you understand what it is like to fall and burn for years at a time. I can’t tell you about the twisted abominations that lurk in that burning nothing beyond our universe. Of the things that gnaw and chew at you, of the terrible, terrible things they whisper in your ears while you fall screaming through their…place.”  
Rukh hissed wordlessly and squeezed his eyes shut. Actual tears rolled down his cheeks.  
“You sound…troubled, Janos.”  
Rukh’s eyes snapped open.  
“MAD, you mean!”  
Benet spread his hands and nodded.  
Rukh snatched the case off the table and shoved it into his own pocket.  
“Half your supply?”  
Benet nodded grimly.  
“I have used the last samples of Radium X that I carried away from the clinic. I have no more. But Drake is on his way back to the crater. With luck he will be back before the last of the counteractive is exhausted. He will be bringing back more Radium X, more than enough to keep us both alive…to keep us both HERE...” He rapped his knuckles on the table. “…and out of our respective hells.”  
Rukh lurched to his feet.  
“Drake!” He snarled. “Drake is here again, in Africa?”  
Benet nodded cautiously.  
“Is…is Diana with him?”  
Benet said nothing.  
Rukh’s face contorted into a grimace that was equal parts pain and rage.  
“Is there no end to how much he can steal from me? My wife wasn’t enough for him. Now he wants the rest of the Radium X too!”  
Wavering unsteadily, Rukh turned and half ran back the way he came.  
As Benet watched him leave, he was acutely aware that he was watching a murderer and a madman. And he wondered if there was any way to win the deadly game that the two of them were playing against each other.  
Once Rukh had disappeared down the stairs Benet waved for one of the servers to come to him.  
“I need you to send a telegram, as soon as possible!”  
Drake and Diana were in terrible danger. He had to try to warn them, if he was able.

Dr. Benet was deep in thought as he walked back through the Imperial’s lobby. He did not hear the men walking behind him until rough hands took hold of his shoulders.  
He looked up in surprise to see two uniformed colonial police with frowns on their coarse, thuggish faces.  
“Dr. Felix Benet? You will be coming with us now. Please.”  
There was no doubt that they were not asking for his cooperation, and perhaps were rather hoping he would resist.


	18. Rukh and Diana

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Janos Rukh stalks his ex-wife, with murderous intent.

RUKH AND DIANA  
The African Colonial lodge was where Drake and Diana stayedwhile Drake prepared for his expedition to the Radium X site. It was a large, sprawling building, built up off the ground along a hillside with wide, airy rooms that had open walls, covered by mats that roll down rather than windows. A wide balcony ran around the outer wall, covered by a roof with white rolls of mosquito netting that could be lowered at night. It was more like an open-walled room than a balcony, with rattan tables and wicker chairs strewn about it. Servants and stewards dressed in starched white suits scurried about, tending to the guests.  
From the main lobby and bar, a piano could be heard, sometimes giving forth languid classical strains, at other times spewing ragged honky tonk. Adventurers either preparing to go into the jungle or recovering from returning from it, chatted and laughed and sent up great bluish clouds of cigarette and cigar smoke.  
Ronald Drake was right in the thick of this blustery, raucous gathering, standing with one leg on a wooden stool, arms gesturing wildly. His face was shiny with sweat that he paused to mop off from time to time with a handkerchief.   
Diana looked down on the gathering from the second floor railing, where the sleeping rooms were. She fanned herself, clothes nearly plastered to her body by sweat, watching her husband below. Up here, the lodge’s high vault arch of ceiling was in shadow. Fans with wooden blades the size of an ocean-going ships screws rotated slowly. The blue haze of cigarette smoke, the musky scent of many men’s sweat and the dusty hides of animal trophies gathered beneath the dark vault of ceiling in a nose-itching fog, churned constantly by the motions of the fans.  
Diana watched Drake lovingly but with a quiet loneliness. He was so animated and happy, tossing his head back and laughing at a joke, or making weird faces and waving his arms ape-like as he tells a story from his adventures. She was delighted to see him so happy, so fully at ease, like a young boy in a school playground, utterly unselfconscious. But it made her sad that he was rarely that gay with her. With her and the boy, he was always gentle and loving, romantic and considerate, but always reserved. It was clear to her that she and the child are part of the cultured, civilized world that he was so ill at ease with. Lady Arabella taught him impeccable manners, but beneath that calm exterior he chafed and squirmed, like that some wild boy only now squeezed into Sunday best and struggling not to fidget at church.  
She sighed, then turned and re-entered their room. Restless, she prowled about the suite in the moonlight, picking things up and moving things about, trying not to wake the boy, asleep on his cot.  
She heard a sound, the creaking of a board, the rustle of cloth. Looking toward the balcony, with only a waist-high wooden wall and the gauzy film of the mosquito netting between her and the outside, she saw a dark form standing just outside. Though just a black silhouette backlit by the full moon, there was something terribly familiar about the shape, as if she knows it in her bones, in the pit of her belly, even though her eyes are hampered by the darkness.   
Breath caught in her throat. She raised one hand and pressed it against her breast, as if to push down a heaving anxiety before it can quite form.  
The shape outside the window shifted slightly and a sickly green glow, like the phosphorescence of something dead, rotting in the jungle, emanated from the face, turned toward her at last. She stopped breathing altogether. Her hand pushed harder against her breast, now striving to hold her wildly beating heart in place.  
The glowing face at the window was that of Janos Rukh, her first husband. Her now years dead husband.  
He saw the recognition in her eyes and a ghoulish smile sprang to his lips. Slowly he began to pull off his gloves, baring long-fingered spidery hands, poisonous green almost dripping from them. The look in his eyes was menacing and piercing and rough. At once she became intensely aware of her cotton shift, plastered against her skin, across the curves of her breasts, her hips, adhering to her belly, wet with sweat. She was also aware that those hands, slowly reaching for her had already touched that body, gripped it, owned it.  
Janos, her first husband, was an intense man, possessed of a single-minded passion that bordered on mania. Most of the time, for years before their parting—his death, she reminds herself with a shudder—that intensity was turned toward his experiments. But there had been a time, especially in the early days of their marriage, when that intensity had been turned to her.  
She felt her cheeks blush when she realized that as much as she loved Ronald Drake’s tenderness and gentle touch, there were times when she missed the fierce, almost cruel grasp of Janos’ hands. She almost longed to surrender to those hands, poisonous and deadly though they might be. Her blush deepened, cheeks burning hot despite the ice-water chill in her veins when she saw, through the way Janos’s grin quirked that he somehow knew of her longing. As the green hands pushed through the netting, as if parting a mist, she heard pattering footsteps from behind her. A little hand tugged at her hem.  
“Well, hello there!” said a fearless little voice, surrounded by sleepy yawns.  
The fierce look in Janos’s eyes softened, regret and betrayed hurt crept into them. The hands wavered, then withdrew. With a last pained grimace, the black figure at the window turned and stalked away.  
Diana let out an agonized gasp, her breath long held pressed inside her chest gushing out, then fainted dead away.  
That’s how Drake found her, sprawled helpless across the floor, as if her white body had been spilled there, with their child sitting beside her, crying softly with fear that he didn’t understand.


	19. The Thing in the Jungle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rukh continues to stalk his ex-wife, but doesn't reckon with veteran adventurer Jan Browning.

THE THING IN THE JUNGLE

Diana stood at the window as night poured itself across the jungle outside, spreading red then dark purple, like spilled wine soaking through the leaves and branches. A raucous chorus of screams and screeches rose from the darkened forest, savage creatures fighting to live through another night. She shuddered and hugged her shoulders, pressing breasts tight against a thudding heart.  
Before, with Ronald near at hand, bubbling over with enthusiasm for his upcoming expedition, talking a mile a minute about the minutiae of supplies and logistics, she could almost convince herself that her encounter with Janos, her supposedly dead ex-husband, had been nothing more than a dream. It was a nightmare that she had often, after all, fueled by the nagging guilt she felt for leaving Janos for Ronald, despite the fact that Janos had all but abandoned her for his experiments with Radium X. Many nights she woke screaming with the image of Rukh’s glowing, lethal hands reaching for her throat branded on the inside of her eyelids.  
In a twinkling the last purplish vestiges of sunlight faded leaving the jungle pitch black under a starless, moonless clouded sky.  
Abruptly the raucous din of the night jungle fell silent. The screeches, the screams, the whine and chirrups of the insects all ceased simultaneously, as if on cue.  
The only sounds Diana could hear were the muffled music drifting up from the Lodge’s public room, and the toss and thrash of wind churning through the trees.  
Diana clutched the bamboo frame of the window with a white-knuckled hand.  
A light glimmered down in the jungle, an eerie bobbing green light that grew brighter as it drew closer to the Lodge. Something was working its way through the trees, coming toward her. She could just make out a face, blurred by the glow surrounding it. Twin black holes pierced that ghastly visage and glittered darkly in the midst of its poisonous light.  
Diana let out a shriek of terror. Even in the dark, even at a distance, she recognized that face. It was the face of her nightmares, the face she had almost convinced herself she hadn’t actually seen, days earlier.  
Hearing his mother’s scream, little Francis crawled out of bed and padded toward her.  
“Mommy?” he asked in a quavering voice.  
Diana pulled knuckles away from her mouth and tried to say something to calm her son, but the words choked in her throat and wouldn’t come out. She extended a shaky hand toward him and a broken half smile struggled on her lips.  
“Mommy?” the boy asked again, voice edging toward hysteria.  
Diana glanced back over her shoulder toward the glow creeping through the jungle. It was still there and had come closer, almost directly under her window.  
She tried not to, tried not to scare her panicked son, but she couldn’t stop the new scream that tore itself out of her throat.  
Outside the door of her room, two of the Lodge’s native workers stood staring wordlessly at each other.  
A bell rang in the distance.  
With a gulp, the senior staff worker went to answer the summons of the Lodge’s owner.  
He ran up a short flight of stairs and paused outside an oaken door carved with fetish faces and snarling masks. He rapped lightly then pushed the door open.  
The room inside was shrouded in white mosquito netting, looking much like the inside of a white, gauzy pavilion. Animal heads and trophies covered the walls. In the midst of the jumbled furniture and scattered cushions, an agitated woman was pacing. She wore the same khaki shirt and short pants that the hunters downstairs wore, though the creases on hers were crisper, the cut more carefully tailored. She puffed at an oily black cigarette which left a trail of blue smoke behind her, like the streamer of a ship surging under full steam. Loose brown curls bounced around her frowning face.  
“Is That Woman screaming again?” she snapped.  
The steward rubbed his hands together, anxiously.  
“Yes, Ma’am.”  
“Gah!” She tossed her hands toward the ceiling with its slowly rotating fan.  
“How could my Ronnie ever have shackled himself to such a nervous little bird? What could he possibly see in her?”  
“I dunno, Ma’am.”  
“Well, I won’t have it!” declared the woman, stamping one booted foot. “I aim to get to the bottom of all this screeching and caterwauling.”  
“Yes, Ma’am.”  
Without another word, Jan Browning pushed past her steward and stomped down the stairs to the guest floor.  
She shoved her way past the maids and servants clustered outside a guestroom door. Sobs and the wailing of a scared child echoed from within. Without a word she shoved past them and pushed open the door with barely a rap of her knuckles for a knock.  
As soon as she saw the mother and son huddled together, she knew something really serious was going on.  
One glance at the full-breasted, creamy skinned woman in her sweat soaked silk night gown, looking up with luminous eyes and Jan knew exactly what “her Ronnie” saw in his bride. She also saw that the woman was completely terrified, nearly hysterical with fear, and her small son was equally terrified that his mother was scared, even if he didn’t know of what. In that instant Jan’s heart went out to the woman.  
“Here now.” She said gently, helping Diana to her feet. “Let’s go to my room and have a cup of tea, and you can tell me all about whatever it is that you are afraid of.”

An hour later the two women sat in surprisingly plush chairs over an antique silver tea set. Young Francis was asleep on Jan’s bed, a tame monkey snuggled up against him.  
“And that’s the whole story.” Said Diana, having told Jan the entire history of Radium X, her lethal ex-husband, and the invisible ray. “I don’t know how he came back, or how he found us, but I know what he wants. He wants to kill me. And probably Ronald too.”  
The china tea cup rattled against its saucer when she set it down with a trembling hand.  
“Well!” declared Jan, taking Diana’s hand in both of hers. “That’s not going to happen while you’re here. Not in MY Lodge it isn’t. No one hurts my friends in my own house!”  
“Friends?” Diana asked with a shy smile. “I got the impression, from the way Ronald talked about you, that you might not like me very much.”  
Jan laughed.  
“Oh, dear! We are going to have a long talk about Ronald Drake, you and I. Right after I settle this little problem of yours.”  
Jan pulled a cord, ringing a bell.  
When her servant appeared, she told him to bring her a hunting rifle.  
“The Big One.” She said, with a wolfish smile.

The jungle was still unnaturally quiet when Jan Browning stepped out onto the balcony outside her personal suite. She scanned the dark tree-line, and soon picked out a blob of ghostly green light hovering behind a tree trunk, a blob that might be a face. The smaller glowing spot below it might have been a hand clutching the tree trunk.  
She raised an eyebrow and tested the familiar heft of the elephant gun in her arms.  
Standing straight and tossing her hair back like a mane, Jan shouted at the dark jungle and the half-seen thing lurking in it.  
“Anything threatening my guests, my friends, should know three things about me.” She shouted.  
“First, I’ve faced down bull elephants and charging rhinos. I don’t scare easy.”  
“Second, I have a big gun.”  
Jan shoved a shell almost the size of her hand into the elephant gun.  
“Third, I ‘m a crack shot.”  
BOOM!  
A chunk of wood the size of a watermelon exploded out of the tree trunk not a foot from Rukh’s face.  
Jan smiled when she heard a cry of pain, followed by a scream of rage.  
With a dramatic flourish, she held up a second shell, cracked open the still smoking elephant gun, and loaded it.  
By the time she raised the barrel of the gun for a second shot, the green light was rapidly receding deeper into the jungle.  
Jan smiled.  
That’s the thing she loved about elephant guns. One shot was generally enough to settle any situation. She rarely ever needed to take another.


	20. Ronald Drake's Darkest Day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Drake returns from his expedition to face the music.

RONALD DRAKE’S DARKEST DAY

Weeks later, after a long and fruitless expedition, filled with dangers and difficulties to try even the strongest of men, it was with a heavy heart that Drake doled out the final pay, in the form of tobacco, tinned beef, and ammunition to the bearers and let them go. He watched the last of the boys disappear down the jungle trail and sighed. He half-wished he was going with them.  
The half dozen Europeans in the Science Foundation’s disastrous expedition trudged their way up the hill toward Jan Browning’s Lodge. All of the men were drenched with sweat, caked with mud, and had crusted bug bites all over their exposed limbs. Smitley had the shakes and was shivering from some tropical fever he’d contracted. Verhauser’s arm had turned black below the tourniquet and he would most likely lose it. Young Howard shuffled like a zombie, shell-shocked by the horrors they had witnessed. Macpherson glowered darkly and muttered threats toward anyone who got within a yard of him. He’d become a veritable devil once the whiskey ran out.  
Only Drake’s longtime friend and companion, Sir Robert Weatherby seemed to be healthy and in good spirits.  
“I don’t care what you say you and Smitley heard,” he proclaimed with his clipped aristocratic accent. “You’ll never convince me that gorilla could talk. Simply preposterous, Old Man.”  
Sir Robert clapped a friendly hand on Ronald’s shoulder and gave him a bit of a shake.  
“I heard what I heard, when I heard it.” Ronald insisted with dogged determination, albeit in a weary voice.  
“Aw, cheer up lad! So, we failed to find that fabulous magic mine of yours. At least we know no one else is going to be digging it out anytime soon. We gathered some magnificent specimens for the Foundation, drew in a few blank spots on the map, and had a deuce of an adventure with crazy Mirakle and his trained apes. You’ll have one hell of a tale to tell Diana and that boy of yours!”  
“I suppose.” Sighed Ronald.  
Sir Robert slapped his shoulder again. Sir Robert always seemed to be slapping or thumping or otherwise laying hands on his friends. His high spirits could be exhausting to lesser mortals, like a tired Ronald Drake.  
“If he starts to sing that damn Tipperary song one more time, I will pop him in the face.” He muttered under his breath.  
“What was that?” asked Sir Robert with a smile that just couldn’t possibly be that white after weeks in the jungle. “I couldn’t quite hear you.”  
Sir Robert’s uncannily acute sense of hearing was nearly legendary in these parts.  
Ronald glared at him.  
Sir Robert laughed. His teeth really were just unnaturally white. It was quite unnerving.  
“I say, isn’t that your wife sitting on the veranda with Jan Browning?”  
The two women wore dazzlingly white dresses and wide brimmed straw hats. Servants were fanning them with ostrich plumes. They had tropical drinks in their hands, garnished with rare flowers and seemed to be chatting and laughing like old friends.  
“I say.” Sir Robert began. “Weren’t you and Jan Browning once…”  
“We had a few adventures together. Yes.” answered Ronald tersely.  
The two women exchanged looks and smiled strange, knowing, cat-like smiles.  
“Sir Robert, would you mind sticking with me while I share the expedition news with the ladies. Just for moral support, you know.”  
Sir Robert took a look at the raised eyebrows and sphinx-like expressions of the women.  
“Not on a dare, lad. I’ll be in the bar.”  
Sir Robert tipped his battered hat to the ladies and wandered off, trying entirely too hard to look casual and nonchalant. He was humming that damn Tipperary song.  
Ronald Drake swallowed hard.  
He put on the best smile he could muster and bravely stepped forward to meet his fate.


	21. Prisoner X

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A dangerous prisoner is released.

PRISONER X  
Two brutish men in dark gray uniforms picked their way down stone steps after unlocking a rusted iron gate. They both carried long wooden poles tipped with lassos, the tools one would use to handle a dangerous beast. Both men sweated profusely and one mopped his brow with a white handkerchief.   
“I don’t like this.” He grumbled to his companion. “I don’t like this at all.”  
“Orders is orders.” Muttered the other, resignedly.   
The two men threaded their way through a maze of cramped stone corridors. Boots splashing through errant brackish puddles.  
One of the men carried a hand-torch, its stark white beam the only light source in the grim dungeon warren. The harsh circle of light bobbled and jigged across the floor as its bearer’s hand shook.  
Abruptly they turned a corner and saw another faint light ahead. Eerie green ripples shimmered across the ceiling, an unnatural radioactive glow reflected by water.  
“I don’t like this one bit.”  
The flashlight beam skipped and jittered around the iron-barred gate to the cell from which the green light came.  
“Orders is orders.” Repeated the other man. “Hold that thing steady!”  
While the first man held the shuddering white light on the gate, the second man unlocked it with one from a cluster of seldom used keys on a huge steel ring.  
As the gate creaked open, the second man braced himself, holding his wooden pole ahead of him.  
“That’s really not necessary.” Said a tired voice from inside the cell.  
A gaunt and haggard-looking Dr. Felix Benet sat on the edge of his metal framed prison cot. A malign green crepuscular light burned beneath his skin, the tell-tale glow of unchecked Radium X poisoning.  
The corpses of dead rats and shriveled spiders lie scattered about the floor of his cell, victims of his poisonous proximity. A quarter inch of foul water covered most of the cell’s floor.  
The first of the guards sent to fetch Benet took a syringe case out of a pocket on his uniform and slid it across the floor toward the prisoner. It slushed through the puddle water, sending ripples across the cell. Dr. Benet grimaced, lifted the dripping case gingerly with finger and thumb and gave the guard a disapproving look.  
“The doctor said to give you this.”  
Benet nodded as graciously as he could and opened the case, wiping it off with his sleeve.  
“If you gentlemen could excuse me for a moment.” He carefully removed a syringe, filled it with a dose of counteractive, and pulled up his sleeve. “I will join you shortly.”  
The guards winced and stepped away from the door of the cell.  
Minutes later they herded their stumbling but no longer luminescent prisoner back through the tunnels and up the stairs toward daylight.


	22. Suspicions

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Benet is confronted by a couple representing the Tropical Medicine Foundation.

SUSPICIONS  
Dr. Felix Benet was ushered out of the dungeons and up to a cluttered suite in the Colonial offices.  
Maps of the West African coast lined the walls, alongside less detailed and probably speculative maps of the interior. Red pins dotted one of the maps, clustered around barely pronounceable village names.  
Benet swiped his hair into place with an unsteady hand and lowered himself into the first chair he came to. He wore the same scuffed and stained clothes he’d been arrested in.  
“You must forgive my appearance,” he said, voice dripping with sarcasm. “I have not had an opportunity to freshen up.”  
Two people had been waiting for him in the study. The first was a broad-shouldered man with dark hair, thick eyebrows, and a squarish, roughly handsome face. He stood with one foot on a chair leaning toward Benet, practically bristling with anger. He wore a light tropical suit.  
The second was a blonde woman with delicate cheekbones, a face ringed with blonde curls, and the most remarkable, if somewhat frosty, blue-green eyes. She wore a red and white flowered shirt and a white skirt. Even sitting down she looked slim and rangy and long-legged. Benet suspected that standing she would be as tall as he was, if not taller. She had a lithe, wiry build, wolfishly athletic but with generous curves. Little beads of sweat trickled down the cleavage visible beneath her daringly unbuttoned shirt.  
“That’s Patricia. My wife.” Growled the man with a frown.  
Benet smiled at the lady, who to his surprise smiled back. It was a courageous, challenging smile but not one lacking warmth.  
“Very pleased to meet you.” Said Benet with a crinkly smile.  
“I am Jim Martin. Doctor James Martin, with the Tropical Medicine Foundation.”  
“Pleased to meet you.” Repeated Benet, not taking his eyes off the face of the lovely lady in front of him.  
A faint pink blush flared on her cheeks, and she cast an amused glance toward her husband.  
Jim Martin huffed, then paced over to the map on the wall with the red pins in it.  
“We’ve been sent by the Foundation to investigate outbreaks of sleeping sickness along the coast. Mostly a little north of here, in Portuguese West Africa.”  
“I have heard of these.” Commented Benet, his professional curiosity aroused.  
“Thought you might have!” snapped Martin. “We’ve noticed something interesting about the distribution of the cases, and some strange things about the way the disease has been spreading. Or rather, not spreading. Not spreading in any way that would be normal for sleeping sickness. My wife, Patricia, was actually the one who discovered the pattern.”  
Martin glanced at his wife, who nodded imperceptibly and picked up the discussion.  
“You see, Dr. Benet, this disease hasn’t been spreading person to person. Not beyond the original outbreak zones, anyway. It doesn’t seem to be communicable by contact with the infected. And it is not being carried by insects. Whole communities are affected at once, practically overnight. But the number of infections doesn’t rise after the initial onset. Visitors to the stricken communities are only affected if they were present the day the outbreak starts. Those who came later, to tend the sick and bury the dead, never come down with the disease themselves.”  
“Interesting.” Remarked Benet. “That doesn’t sound like any tropical disease I’ve ever heard of.”  
“Exactly! It looks more like some sort of contamination in the community.”  
“Or poisoning.” Interjected Jim.  
“Ah.” Said Benet, nodding. “And you believe I may have something to do with this. Because…”  
“Yes, Dr. Benet. Because. We are familiar with your work, your see. With your record.”  
Benet sighed.  
“You think I may be experimenting with Radium X again.”  
“Are you?” asked Patricia sharply.  
Benet winced.  
“No fair lady, I am not.”  
He rubbed his face with unsteady hands and sighed.  
“The French government seized all of my supply of Radium X when the…side effects became known. I was forced to leave the country, rather abruptly. I do not possess any quantities adequate for experimentation. On any scale.”  
“And yet you were carrying a quantity of Radium X on you when you were picked up.”  
“A very small quantity.” Agreed Benet, patting the case in his jacket pocket. “Which you must know I need just to survive. All that I possess is on my person, right now. Thankfully returned just before I would have no longer had any need for it.”  
Dr. Martin grimaced.  
“My apologies for that. When we learned of your presence in the colony, we requested that the authorities hold you until we could arrive and ask some questions. We had no idea they would be so…clumsy about it.”  
Benet grunted, noncommittally.  
“Since you need it to survive, surely you have an additional supply of Radium X.” Patricia coaxed.  
“No, Madame. I am sure you have had a chance to search my hotel room and the lockbox in the hotel safe. I am quite out of the evil stuff. I was depending on asking a friend who is leading an expedition to the original source of Radium X to procure an additional, medicinal supply.”  
“Drake.” Martin said, shuffling through some papers on file.  
“Yes. But I was…’picked up’ before I had a chance to talk with him concerning that.”  
“So, you deny that you have been engaged in any kind of medical experimentation?”  
“Sir, I have been engaged only in a great deal of drinking. I have not left my room more than absolutely necessary for months. I am sure that the hotel staff can corroborate that.”  
“They have.” Patricia added.  
“I am curious. Have you found any traces of Radium X in these contaminated villages?”  
“No. None that we could detect. But we are not the World’s leading expert on Radium X and its uses.”  
“Neither am I.” whispered Benet.  
“What was that?”  
“Rukh.” Benet shuddered. “Rukh is the only one who ever, truly, understood how to use Radium X. I should have seen that, should have understood.”  
Benet closed his eyes, a look of pain contorting his face.  
“That does not help us much, since everyone knows that Janos Rukh is dead.”  
“Everyone knows.” Echoed Benet with a rueful smile.  
“Besides, there have been mysterious deaths in the area recently.”  
Benet raised an eyebrow, dreading what he might learn next.  
“Bodies found with hand prints burned into the flesh.”  
“Did the hand prints glow?”  
“No, but we though perhaps you had discovered some way to disguise the effects of Radium X poisoning.”  
“You have been reading too many lurid newspaper stories, Dr. Martin. I am not some mad scientist, hiding in the jungle trying to create an army of atomic supermen, or some sort of invisible death ray. I am just a doctor who wanted to heal the sick, but who made a terrible, terrible mistake. I am not your plague spreading poisoner. I am just a sick, broken man waiting to die.”  
Benet put his face in his hands and could not be roused further.

Jim Martin and Patricia stood together, whispering, by the high-arched window.  
“What do you think?” Martin asked his wife.  
“I believe him. That’s not a mad doctor, that’s a man in pain who has given up hope. Besides, his story checks out, for the most part.”  
“Then we’re back to square one.” Sighed Jim.  
“I’m not so sure.” Pat mused. “I do think there’s something he’s not telling us. Some secret he’s keeping to himself. Perhaps we’ll learn more when Drake gets back from his expedition. In the meantime, we do have the World’s leading expert, living expert, on the uses of Radium X in our hands. If someone else is using the poisonous stuff, Dr. Felix Benet might prove to be a very useful friend to have.”


	23. The First Ship to Somewhere Else

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Drakes depart with great haste.

THE FIRST SHIP TO SOMEWHERE ELSE  
Out on the rippled blue sea, a fast steamship was churning toward the horizon. It left a frothy wake mile long behind it. Smudged streaks of black smoke and white steam wafted skyward above it long tattered clouds.  
Dr. Benet leaned heavily on the iron railing at the docks, watching it go with both sadness and extreme relief.   
The Drakes were aboard that ship. Almost as soon as he returned from his ill-fated expedition, Ronald Drake had gathered his wife and son and headed toward the coast as fast as humanly possible. Ten of Browning’s best huntsmen accompanied them, all armed to the teeth and fiercely vigilant. With good cause too, an unnatural, glowing green shape stalked them every step of the way, like a jungle phantom, always just in sight behind them, but never within range for the party’s hunting rifles. Several times the men doubled back to try to ambush it, but the thing in the jungle was clever and avoided their traps.  
As soon as they reached the town, Drake booked passage on the very first ship departing Africa, leaving barely hours after arriving. He left most of the family’s baggage behind, to be shipped to England at some later time. The ship they’d boarded was heading toward Brazil, or Venezuela, or some similarly steamy New World destination. Drake bribed the colonial authorities to expedite his departure papers and some South American diplomat was dining lavishly on what Ronald paid him to stamp their passports in advance.  
The Drakes departed with such single-minded speed that they had not paused long enough to even meet with Dr. Benet. The only good-bye he received from them was a lengthy, effusively apologetic letter written by Diana and passed to him by a sweat-glazed runner.  
Benet could not blame them for their haste. He knew what they were running from. The only thing that troubled him was the report that there was no Radium X to be found. The site had been thoroughly looted, then just as thoroughly destroyed. That news hit Felix Benet as hard as what it really was—a death sentence. Without a supply of Radium X, he could not make more of the counteragent that kept his own toxicity in check. Without the counteragent he was doomed to the same poisonous madness and death that stalked Janos Rukh. Worse than death, if what Rukh had ranted about was at all true.  
Benet shuddered at the thought. He pulled his overcoat tighter around his shoulders. Chills in the tropical sunshine! Already the Radium X was beginning to burn in his veins.  
Dr. Benet’s reverie was interrupted by the sound of approaching footsteps. Loud, clacking against the paving stones, a staccato rap filled with equal parts urgency and confidence. It was the Martins. Benet knew without looking. Americans! They even walked loud.  
“Doctor Martin, a pleasant day to you and your lovely wife.” He said, not bothering to turn around.  
“Benet.” Snapped Jim.  
Felix imagined him grinding his teeth and flexing his fists with frustration.  
“Is that the Drakes on that ship?”  
Benet nodded.  
“Ronald Drake was worried for his family. He hustled them aboard the first available ship out of Africa.”  
“I wanted to talk to them.” Muttered Martin.  
“And I wanted to discuss many things with young Ronald, and at least hug his beautiful wife good-bye.” Benet sighed wistfully.  
“Mmm-hmm.” Said Patricia lightly. “I suspect you had more interest in the hug than the conversation. You are quite wicked, Dr. Benet!”  
Her laugh was bright and musical, quite unlike the glowering tones of her husband.  
“Madame!” Benet protested. “I am not wicked. I am French!”  
“Is there a difference?”  
Now he did turn to look at the Americans, his face crinkling with a broad smile.  
“You are a very bright, and a very perceptive young lady, Mrs. Martin. Quite pretty too.”  
“Pat. Or Patricia, if you prefer.”  
Benet bowed, still smiling.   
“Call me Felix, my dear.”  
“If you’re done flirting with my wife, Dr. Benet, there are some important matters I’d like to discuss.”  
Benet looked at Jim Martin and raised an eyebrow. His smile faded, except for one little quirk that tugged the corner of his mouth.  
“Of course, Dr. Martin. Let us discuss these important matters over breakfast and coffee. Like the civilized men we are.”  
He glanced back out to sea, where the ship carrying the Drakes had dwindled to a speck on the horizon.   
“Godspeed, my young friends. Godspeed.” He whispered.


	24. Outbreak

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The true cause of the Sleeping Sickness plague revealed!

OUTBREAK  
The moon was absent from the cloud-scuffed sky leaving only a powdering of stars to lighten the heavens. In near total darkness, the jungle screamed its ceaseless night song, crouching just a few paces from the village. The jungle was a black vine-clawed hungriness forever stalking the cleared fields and thatched huts.  
The house of the colonial administrator rose above the village. A wooden mansion painted stark white with wide verandas and breezy arches. It was as glaringly out of place among the forest and the brown huts as a jagged bone sticking out of torn flesh.  
The Administrator himself, a fat pig of a man always wiping a sheen of sweat from his face and bald pate, stood at the window unable to sleep in the “beastly” heat.   
As he watched a small dark shape scuttled out of the brush, low to the ground, hugging the edges of the huts as it crept toward the center of the village. The fat man watched in fascination, at first barely believing that there was anything actually out there in the darkness, but he had been awake for hours and his vision, the keenest part of him, was completely adapted to the night. He squinted, trying to determine what sort of monkey or cat or other tropical menagerie beast it was that slunk so purposefully to the heart of the village.  
The shape darted and crept and eventually made its way in a strange ambling gait to the well in the central clearing of the village. Once there, it stood upright, still barely three feet tall, and unslung something from over its shoulders. Deft hands worked at the wooden shutters covering the well pulling them loose in moments.  
“What the deuce?” whispered the watcher.  
With one more quick scan of the silent huts around it, the shape at the well lifted an oversized water skin and poured the contents into the well. A snickering laugh followed the quick slamming of the well coverings. The shape scurried for the darkness of the brush as a few faint stirrings of villagers awoken by the sound. 

The same village, some days later, lies under the harshest of sunlight.  
Still forms lie scattered across the ground, most sprawled where and as they fell. Over-worked medical workers covered the bodies and lifted them onto stretchers. Women wept and screamed in groups, clustering together for support. Some villagers looking dazed and unaware shuffled about aimlessly, oblivious to the panic and misery around them. A harried looking African doctor checked vital signs and directed stretcher bearers to the canvas topped trucks that bore away those victims who might still be saved.  
The doctor stood, wiping the back of his hand across his face. He traded a haunted look with the fat administrator who glared at him suspiciously. The fat man was flanked by colonial flunkies, dregs of the worst European criminals washed up in this distant outpost.   
“Another outbreak of the Sleeping Sickness.” Said one of the weary, barely shaven men who passed for aides to the administrator.  
“Whipped up awful sudden-like.” Observed another.  
“Must have been carried in with the wind or something.” Said the first, wrapping a scarf about his nose and mouth.  
“Or something.” Muttered the fat man.


	25. Accusation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Doctor is confronted by the Colonial Administrator

ACCUSATION  
“That is a most remarkable claim, Superintendent De Silva. Most remarkable.”  
The bandage-wrapped man sat stiffly in his overstuffed chair. He swirled a surprisingly good claret in a glass goblet.  
“Nevertheless, it is true!” puffed De Silva, mopping his face for the fifth time so far in their conversation.  
“It is true and I saw it with my own eyes!”  
“Such keen eyes they must be, too. To have made out so much in the darkness of a moonless night.”  
De Silva’s distinctly pig-like eyes squinted.  
“Keen enough, Dr. Graham, if that is really your name. I have been looking into you and this private clinic of yours. There are some very interesting irregularities in your documents. Very interesting.Almost invisible unless you know how to look for them. Unless you know the smell of money when it is well spent.”  
The Doctor sipped his drink.  
“You have proof of these remarkable claims of yours?”  
“Some. I can find more if I have need of it.”  
“Well then, Superintendent, what is it that you need from me?” There was a skillfully disciplined hint of resignation in the bandaged man’s voice.  
The fat man grinned.  
“Money. Well spent.”  
“Ah!”  
Two glasses clinked.


	26. Electrical Executioner

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The wages of corruption are delivered.

ELECTRICAL EXECUTIONER

“That arrogant fool!” snapped the Doctor as he watched De Silva’s launch pull away and chug its way up the mouth of the river.  
“His greed will ruin everything.”  
The Doctor glared at his dwarfish crony.   
“Careless of you, allowing yourself to be seen like that.”  
Napoleon spread his hands in an expansively apologetic gesture.  
“It was after midnight on a moonless night. How could I have known that His Honor would be up and about? Or that he had the eyes of an owl.”  
The Doctor grunted.   
“It surprises me that a man like that can sleep at all.”  
A nasty grin split the dwarf’s face.  
“Do you want me to pay His Honor a visit tonight?”  
The Doctor shook his head.  
“No. That pig will be expecting us to make some move against him. I think a rather more forceful response is called for. Go fire up the generators. I think it is time for our friend Daniel to go for a little walk.”

“Make sure the doors are bolted and barred. Close all of the ground floor shutters and hang nets over the upstairs windows. I’d like to see his little monkey of an assassin try to get in here tonight!”  
De Silva wiped his chin and grinned. The sound of hammering and the slamming of shutters all around him made him smile smugly. After one last inspection of the downstairs doors and windows, the district administrator posted machete-armed guards throughout the house and waddled upstairs to enjoy a rather large bottle of rum and a cigar. It would be wretchedly hot in the house, with all the windows closed up, a veritable steam box, but it would be worth it.  
Night settled over the manor like a black, silken net. The nightly screech and chatter of the jungle rose like fog. The nearly empty village sat dark and silent. While, at the manor, the lights went on—one by one, until the entire house was lit up inside and out. Kerosene lanterns swung and bobbed over the dark grounds as guards made their rounds.   
Shortly after midnight, the jungle fell silent. The sudden cessation of the bird screeches and the warbling of uncounted insects roused De Silva from a shallow slumber, and from a rather sordid dream about his personal secretary Ana. He grunted and reached for the not quite empty bottle of rum. Perhaps, he mused, he should feign a fever and have Ana bring his breakfast to his bed. And serve him there.  
He chuckled at the thought.  
There was startled shouting outside and the sharp crack of a rifle being fired.  
Something heavy crashed against the main door, so violently that the walls shook from the impact.  
There was shouting, furniture crashing to the floor, muffled groans and a choked off scream. More gunshots.Then a final heavy thud at the base of the stairs. There was silence for a few moments, then heavy footsteps thumped up the stairs.  
Probably one of his drunken thugs plodding up to report that they’d killed an intruder and to tell him which pieces of furniture the clumsy oafs had broken in the process. A petty frown crept across De Silva’s brow, and he chased it with a damp cloth. If it was the teak armoire, he thought, someone was about to lose their job!  
The door to his study suddenly burst open, the heavy panels splintering like balsa wood. With a metallic screech, one of the hinges tore loose and flew across the room.  
A huge, broad-shouldered form stood in the doorway, clad from toe to neck in a heavy insulating rubber suit, a rusty brown-red in color, nearly the same color as dried blood. A ghastly, grimacing face leered at him, shimmering blue-white with electrical sparks crawling wormlike across bloodless cheeks. The intruder’s eyes were soulless black holes which pierced the incandescent aura wreathing his face.  
De Silva saw nothing human inside those dark orbs, only a glitter that might have been anger, or perhaps just a flicker of heat-lightning.  
The intruder pulled off one thick rubber glove and shuffled toward De Silva.  
His mouth opened, teeth clenched, and he rasped out just two words.  
“Kill. Him.”  
Then the powerful fingers were digging deep into De Silva’s jowly throat and the electrical current in those fingers sliced deeper, even deeper than bone.  
De Silva felt a shuddering buzzing that seemed to start inside his bones and worked steadily outward. His flesh began to crawl with a million gnawing fire ants of sparks. His skin bubbled.  
There were two wet pops and blue smoke rose from the sockets where his eyes had been. In his last thought it occurred to De Silva that he had forgotten to scream.   
And then the Electric Man let go of his throat and quietly shuffled back out the way he came.


	27. Helga's

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dr. Benet and The Martins discuss important matters in a native eatery.

HELGA’S  
Benet expected the Martins to accompany him back to the Imperial for a proper meal, since there wasn’t another reputable European eatery in the town. Instead, they led him to a native establishment housed in an oddly shaped clay, brick and timber building. The walls were made from large bricks with a smooth facing of sun-baked clay, and were very thick. Inside, beneath a rounded ceiling, there were no tables or chairs. The few other guests present were seated on mats or cushions on the hard earthen floor. They chatted quite loudly in one of the native languages Benet did not understand and scooped food from shared iron pots with their hands.  
Benet was mildly horrified when the Martins headed toward an unused pile of cushions and settled comfortably to sit cross-legged on the floor. Grimacing, the unhappy Frenchman gingerly lowered himself onto the plushest and least stained cushion he could find. It took him at several moments to squirm and fidget into a barely comfortable position.  
A slender light-skinned native woman with heavily freckled cheeks and wiry hair the color of cinnamon came to serve them. She was smiling excitedly and evidently knew the Martins well. She and Jim spoke animatedly in the local language. After a couple of minutes, Jim Martin pointed to Dr. Benet and introduced him, then addressed Benet in English.  
“Dr. Benet, this is Helga, the owner and chief chef of this fine establishment. Her father was a German soldier during the Great War. He was taken prisoner when the Germans invaded Portuguese West Africa. He fell in love with Helga’s mother and decided to stay here after the ended. On top of being an excellent cook, Helga has a remarkable knowledge of local herbal remedies and is a well-known and respected seer.”  
“Bon Jour, Dr. Benet.” The woman said, addressing him in flawless French.  
“She also speaks English, Portuguese, and German of course.” Patricia put in.  
Helga smiled sweetly, nodding her head modestly.  
“Dr. Benet, I can see that this is your first time visiting us. Please let me know if there is anything I can do to make you more comfortable.” She continued.  
You could bring over a table and some chairs and some civilized eating utensils, Benet though, but he replied only with some vague pleasantries.  
When their food came, it was in a common iron pot with a small basket of flat bread. Jim and Patricia dug in, scooping out handfuls and eating quite happily. With another grimace, Dr. Benet took a piece of flat bread and used it as a trencher to scoop out his own share, reluctantly using his fingers to push food onto the bread.  
The meal consisted of a bed of rice with layers of fried plantains and some sort of indigenous beans, topped with filets of fish that had been baked in a clay oven and smothered with a tangy sauce that tasted vaguely fruity.  
Much to his surprise, Benet found the food to be delicious and caught himself licking his fingers after a few bits.  
“Better than you thought it would be, isn’t it?” Patricia asked with a mischievous smile.  
Benet nodded, with raised eyebrows.  
“Now, perhaps we can discuss some important matters that still need to be addressed. “ Jim said.  
“I will gladly share whatever I know myself.” Benet responded with a tight smile.  
“From what I can gather, Ronald Drake’s expedition to the Mountains of the Moon failed to recover any Radium X at all. Apparently someone beat him to it, presumably dug out their own supply, then dynamited the site to keep anyone else from mining there.”  
“I’m wondering if you have any guesses as to who might have done such a thing. There are very few people who know the precise location of the Radium X deposit.”  
“Myself being one of them.” Benet observed with a wry smile.  
“As you say.”  
Benet thought hard, seeming to wrestle with himself over what, exactly, to say.  
“I do not know who actually mined the Radium X before Drake could reach it, but I think I do have knowledge of a possible suspect.”  
“Yes, and…” prodded Jim with a raised eyebrow, waving rice-encrusted fingers.  
“The Drakes were shipwrecked on their way here and were forced to spend some time with a certain Dr. Graham at a private clinic near San Lazaro. From what I can gather, young Drake spoke extensively and perhaps unwisely with their host concerning the details of our original expedition. According to Diana, this Doctor Graham was a strange and very eccentric fellow and some very mysterious things were going on at his clinic.”  
Jim Martin nodded speculatively.  
“The Graham Clinic. I’ve looked into it before. It’s a private clinic established and operated by a small pharmaceutical company, owned by a very old German family with a very questionable past. I couldn’t find out anything about this Dr. Graham. None of his credentials could be verified. There were also some disturbing irregularities in the permits for the clinic, but none of the Colonial officials I spoke to about it seemed at all interested in investigating those irregularities. I suspect that some rather large sums of money exchanged hands over that paperwork.”  
“San Lazaro?” Patricia wondered aloud. “That’s right smack in the middle of the sleeping sickness outbreak zone.”  
“The Drakes mentioned that the clinic was full of sleeping sickness patients and Diana said that dozens of dead bodies were stashed in one of the basements.”  
Jim frowned and shook his head.  
“But the outbreak started long before the Drakes arrived, almost a year ago—maybe longer. The reports were slow to trickle out of the more remote villages. I can’t see how the Radium X figures into any of this.”  
“Perhaps it is not related to the disease cases at all. It might just be a coincidence that someone came looking for Radium X while this outbreak was going on. There may be no connection at all.” Benet observed.  
“I don’t know.” Jim murmured. “I have a strong hunch that there is some kind of connection. I just can’t imagine what it might be. You were here long before the Drakes arrived, and long before the outbreaks began. You’re the only person in the area familiar with the uses, and misuses, of Radium X.”  
Rice-encrusted fingers pointed at Benet.  
“And yet I have spent the entire time that I have been here at my hotel, mostly getting drunk and trying to stay that way. You can hardly suspect me of running secret mining expeditions or disease-causing skullduggery from my room.”  
Jim shook his head, unhappily.  
“Regardless,” Patricia interjected. “I think we should look into this Dr. Graham and San Lazaro. A strange, reclusive doctor, a clinic with suspicious paperwork where mysterious things are going on. At a village in the center of a disease zone. That’s too many coincidences to overlook.”  
Their conversation was interrupted by Helga, who returned with a dessert, some kind of thick pudding made with rice and coconut milk. As she was serving Dr. Benet, she stopped and stared very intently at him.  
“There are many spirits gathered around you. They are all trying to tell you something. Some of them are very angry. Others weep. But I can’t understand them. Too many trying to talk at the same time. You must be a very troubled man.”  
Dr. Benet accepted the pudding bowl from her trembling hands.  
“Madame, you have no idea.” He said, quite seriously.  
The Martins stared after her as Helga quickly walked away.  
“Odd.” Said Patricia.  
After a few fingers full of pudding, Jim spoke up, having reached a decision.  
“We’ll definitely go to San Lazaro. I want to know what is going on there, whether or not it involves any Radium X.”  
“I would appreciate it if you would consider accompanying us, Dr. Benet.” Patricia said, smiling. “If there is anything going on there that involves Radium X, I would feel better having the World’s leading expert on Radium X with us.”  
Jim gave Benet a look that strongly suggested that there was no question about him going.  
Dr. Benet smiled ruefully, as if at some secret joke, but he magnanimously nodded.  
“For you, beautiful lady, I’ll go anywhere you ask.”  
Jim Martin frowned sourly, but said nothing.  
At that moment Helga walked up, carrying little bowls of water and dry towels which she presented to the diners. The Martins immediately began to clean their fingers.  
As she leaned low to give Benet his bowl, she shuddered, convulsing as if from some sort of fit. Her eyes rolled up until only the whites were showing. Her lips curled back from her teeth in a fierce animal snarl.  
“Beware! Beware the Man Who Does Not Die!” a gravelly voice said through her mouth. “Hands of death and eyes of fire. Things walk in the night. Death waits in the tower of the risen man, in the prison of the hopeless.”  
Then she babbled in an incomprehensible language until she screamed and ran off.  
All the other guests fled during the outburst.  
Dr. Benet sat very still, face pale, eyes blinking in surprise.  
“Well, that’s unsettling.” Jim Martin said, eventually.


	28. "I Told You I would Wring Your Neck!"

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dr. Benet and Janos Rukh meet under less than friendly circumstances.

“I TOLD YOU I WOULD WRING YOUR NECK!”  
Dr. Benet walked unsteadily on the way back from Helga’s. He wiped his hands repeatedly with a handkerchief but just couldn’t get them to feel clean. Sweat stood out in clear beads across his forehead.  
So focused was he on the strange incident at the restaurant that he didn’t hear the approach of running footsteps or sense any danger until fingers hot as coals and strong as iron clamped tight around his throat and he was dragged kicking and gasping into an alley between two buildings.   
Benet tried to yell for help but only a muffled gurgling sound came out.  
“I told you I would wring your neck!” snarled a familiar voice in his ear.  
“Rukh!” Benet gasped in a hoarse whisper.  
He could feel the deadly radiation from Rukh’s hands burning into him, so intense that even with a fresh dose of counteractive in his veins he could feel heat and a skin-crawling horripilation spreading over his skin. Hot wires of lethal poison shot through his bones, scorching Benet from the inside out. Only the counter agent that he had invented himself kept Benet from dropping dead on the spot.  
Benet grabbed the hands gripping his throat and pulled at the fingers with all his strength. He succeeded in loosening their grip just a little, enough to wheeze in a few desperately needed breaths.  
“Rukh!” He choked. “Know…where…Radium X…”  
Abruptly the hands let loose of his throat and Benet fell to the ground, coughing and gasping for breath.  
Rukh’s face loomed over him, mouth stretched in a fierce, wide smile, eyes burning with the fever of madness. There were fresh scars covering his cheek and one eye was swollen half shut.  
“Go on!” he hissed.  
Benet nodded and took a deep breath.  
“It’s Drake’s fault.” He said.  
Rukh snorted and actually gnashed his teeth.  
“He talked about the expedition, told everything to some Dr. Graham, in a place called San Lazaro. There’s no one else who could have done it. Graham must have gone for the Radium X as soon as the Drakes left. Mined out the site, somehow, while Drake was still buying supplies and hiring bearers. If anyone has any Radium X, it’s Graham. In San Lazaro.”  
“San Lazaro.” Mused Rukh. “Saint Lazarus. The man who was raised from the dead. How appropriate.”  
Rukh laughed harshly, for too long.  
Benet squinted up at the man, gravely worried for Rukh’s sanity, and for his own life.  
“What happened to your face Janos?” Benet asked, cautiously.  
“There was a madwoman with an elephant gun.” Rukh spat, grimacing.  
The Radium X poison was burning so fiercely in Rukh’s body that his skin looked luminous even in the bright light of day.  
“I think I should pay a visit to this Doctor Graham. Give him the benefit of my extensive experience with Radium X. Lend a hand, as it were.”  
He raised a hand that burned from within, the finger bones a dark skeletal shadow beneath glowing flesh.  
Rukh laughed again, before turning abruptly and stalking off.  
Dr. Benet rubbed his throat and sighed with relief. He hoped that he and the Martins could reach San Lazaro before Rukh did. Otherwise, there might not be anything left to investigate.


	29. Ghost-Walkers of the Haunted Forest

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The people of San Lazaro witness strange and frightening things in the night.

GHOST-WALKERS OF THE HAUNTED FOREST  
Upriver, inland from the old Portuguese fort, lies what was once a village but is now more of a bustling river town. It is a cluster of mud-walled buildings and houses with thick thatched roofs, open frames with “walls” of rattan-blinds or woven hangings. A packed dirt road winds through it, connecting the central market with the riverbank where dozens of canoes and dugouts of various sizes are pulled up out of the water and lie tilting on their sides in the mud. It is along the riverbank that the men can be found, sitting on woven mats, bare toes digging into the soft black mud. Lit cigarettes pass from hand to mouth in fiery red swarms. There is a near constant murmur of soft chatter and whispers. A bottle of something that looks like murky river water but smells more like turpentine is passed around.  
San Lazaro.  
The night was filled with raucous tropical sounds, shrieks and cackles, the buzzing of swarms of insects, a din that the men had to raise their voices to be heard over. Suddenly the jungle night-noises begin to fall silent until there was a complete, oppressive stillness—as if the jungle shuddered, then held its breath.  
The men stopped talking and began to look around apprehensively. From the hillside across the river, where a hidden path led to the old Portuguese slave fort, there came the sound of something crashing, lurching through the brush. A harsh, flickering blue light could be seen moving like heat lightning among the trees. There was a sizzling, crackling sound, audible from across the river, as the flickering light slowly made its way across the black hillside. A low mournful moan drifted across the gurgle of the river. The men, wide-eyed with fear, threw the bottle aside, dropped their cigarettes and raced into the village, seeking shelter behind the most solid walls they could find.

The next night, having heard the stories of the boatmen, a large group of villagers gathered at the riverbank. There was a festive air to the gathering, with laughter and hand clapping and the squeals of young children, the wavering songs of women and the bark of older men who wished to be heard and taken seriously. Once again, the forest fell silent, all the noise drained out of it like rain water soaking into dry sand. The villagers stopped talking. A hush fell over the crowd. Again, over the gurgle and splash of the river, came hissing and crackling, as well as the sound of something large crashing through the underbrush.  
A big, burly man stepped out of the crowd. He gestured for others to follow him, but no one does. He spat angrily, pushed a dugout canoe down into the water and climbed aboard. He paddled across the river, beached the boat and stalked into the forest, all the while making angry and obscene gestures at the cowards who would not join him.   
Some time passed as the villagers watched. There was a horrified shout of agony accompanied by a bright blue flash of light and a snapping noise like the sudden crack of a whip. Screams poured out of the dark jungle then stopped abruptly.   
The next day, village men grown braver in the sun’s light crossed the river and searched for the man who had been missing since disappearing into the night. They found his body curled in the brush, arms and legs rigid, hands clenched into fists with burnt fingers. On his face was an expression of unspeakable horror. His eyes were wide open, bulging from their sockets and his last scream was frozen on his open lips. The dead man’s skin was blistered and charred, but most horribly, there was an ash-white handprint seared into his bare chest. The men who found the body wept with horror and none would touch it to bring it back to the village. The dead man’s family had to cross over themselves, throw a blanket across the remains and carry them back home for burial. 

The next night, when the ghostly blue light flickered through the forest across the river, there was no one out to see it. Most of the village houses stood empty, their occupants fled. Those who have stayed were huddled behind barred doors and fastened shutters, sleepless and silent with fear.


	30. The Zombies of San Lazaro

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dr. Benet and the Martins arrive in San Lazaro to witness a strange and gruesome sight.

THE ZOMBIES OF SAN LAZARO  
Jim Martin was the first out of the boat when the steam launch finally pulled up to the half-rotted wooden deck that served as a dock for the village of San Lazaro. He leaped from the bow of the boat and landed with a thump. Turning, he gestured for the native deck hand to throw him a rope to secure the launch. Bemused at the white man who insisted on doing his job for him, the deck hand lackadaisically tossed the rope, remembering as an afterthought to secure his own end to a bracket on the gunwale. Martin vigorously tied the rope to a wooden post, winding it several knots more than were necessary to keep the launch from being borne away by the sluggish river current.  
“He certainly is…energetic isn’t he?” Dr. Benet observed from his deck under a tattered parasol.  
Patricia, who was wearing shorts and a midriff baring top was stretched out on the deck on a blanket, basking in the tropical sun, looked up with a smile.   
“Jim’s not happy unless he’s doing something.”  
She yawned, stretched her arms and stood, gathering up her blanket. She pretended not to notice that Dr. Benet was staring unabashedly at her legs, with that quirky little half-smile of his.  
“Usually it’s something helpful, though, so people generally don’t seem to mind.”  
She mopped her brow and wiped off her limbs with the blanket, making rather more of a production out of it than was strictly necessary. She cast a quick sideways glance at the French doctor.  
His appearance worried her. His skin was pale and his face slick with sweat. He was bundled in a dark coat, despite the glaring sun and tropical heat.  
“I’m dying.” He said matter of factly. “But I am not quite dead yet, young lady.”  
Patricia blushed and flashed a quick apologetic smile.  
Martin bounded back aboard the launch and walked up at that moment, frowning.  
Patricia patted his arm. “I’ll help you get our things.” She said pulling him toward the tiny cabin they’d shared.  
Dr. Benet sighed and struggled to his feet.  
Dr. James Martin was rather a boor, he. But Benet was beginning to like his wife. Patricia was vivacious, well-mannered, and she had a radiant smile which she occasionally shared with him.  
Despite not really having a choice in the matter, Benet was happy that he had agreed to accompany the couple on their investigation into the very heart of the “sleeping sickness” outbreak zone. And if his suspicions about the mysterious Dr. Graham’s clinic were true, he might yet secure enough Radium X to produce another batch of counteragent.  
“Yes.” He murmured. “Not quite dead yet.”

The three made their way along bare boards that formed a walkway of sorts between the riverside dock and the dirt lanes of the village proper, which were only slightly firmer than the muddy mires along the river.  
“Where is everybody?” Patricia asked.  
The streets of the village were empty, the market abandoned. The doors of every ramshackle house were closed and barred, every window shuttered. There was an eerie silence to the place, no chatter of gossip, no laughter or song, no shouting of workmen or squeal of children. There was only a tense stillness. Even the jungle crouching at the town’s edge seemed unnaturally quiet.  
“Perhaps the sleeping sickness…” began Jim.  
“I don’t think so. Look!” Benet pointed down the road that meandered through the jungle before ending in the village’s empty market square.  
A troupe of men, shirtless, shoeless, wearing only tattered white pants were shuffling toward the village. They walked in single file, maybe a dozen of them. Their eyes stared unblinking straight ahead.  
As the strange parade trudged nearer, the door to a building, larger than others in the village and boasting a radio aerial, banged open. Several men hustled out the door dragging crates and carrying boxes. They hurriedly piled their burdens in the street and darted back inside.  
The strange shuffling men walked to the pile, ignoring the Martins and Dr. Benet, who watched from a safe distance. Men lifted boxes and set them on their heads, then turned and began trudging back the way they came. Pairs of them lifted crates by each end and in a matter of moments the entire mound of supplies was hefted and carried away.  
The last in the line of silent walkers carried a small white carton in his hands, which he sat in the exact center of where the mound of crates and boxes had been. He paused, staring at the closed door of the storehouse for a moment, then turned and stared at the three newcomers. His eyes were glassy and unfocused, his cheeks gaunt. His body was emaciated with ribs showing and bones threatening to poke through thin flesh at any moment.  
Abruptly his mouth split into a horrid grin and he nodded toward the Martins and Benet. Solemnly the skeletal being raised one hand and gave an astonishingly child-like finger waggling wave to them.  
Then the smile broke and his mouth fell closed. Without a word he turned and shuffled off after the others, who were already winding their way out of the village and disappearing into the jungle.  
“Oh, Jim!” gasped Patricia, burying her face in her husband’s shoulder. She shivered with barely repressed horror.  
Dr. Martin seemed as stricken as his wife, staring after the receding shapes, a frown on his brow, but an astonished “O” of surprise on his lips.  
Dr. Benet shrugged and stooped to examine the carton and its contents. Inside were about twenty pint-sized glass bottles filled with some watery brown fluid.  
Curious, he unscrewed the cap of a bottle. A bitter, acrid smell stung his nostrils.  
Suddenly the door to the storehouse banged open and a large man in a worn colonial uniform burst out.  
“Here, now! That’s medicine!” he barked. “We need that.”  
Benet bowed slightly and presented the carton, which was snatched eagerly from his hands.  
“Allow me to introduce myself, I am Dr. Felix Benet, and these are my companions, Dr Martin and his wife Patricia. They work for the Tropical Medicine Foundation. We are here to investigate the sleeping sickness outbreak.”  
The man grunted a perfunctory greeting. Others slowly wandered out of the storehouse, while doors were being unbarred and opened all around the market square. Villagers were beginning to timidly exit their homes and the streets of San Lazaro began to stir back to life.  
Jim Martin walked up and stared at the bottles in the carton with open curiosity.  
“You say there’s medicine in those bottles? Is it for the sleeping sickness?”  
The official nodded.  
“Doctor Graham makes it, up at the clinic. It’s the reason no one in San Lazaro has died of the sickness while all the villages around us have suffered terribly.”  
“Are you saying that this Doctor Graham has a cure for the plague?”  
The official shrugged.  
“Everybody in the town takes a dose. No one has gotten sick. The Doctor says it takes regular doses to keep the sickness away. Says he can’t make more than enough for one village. We gather the supplies he needs and trade them for the medicine. No one here gets sick.”  
The big man shuffled a little, as if uncomfortable talking about the village’s special arrangements with the mysterious Doctor Graham.  
“Could we have a look at some of that medicine?” Jim asked.  
The official shuffled and shoved wide knuckled hands in his pockets.  
“There’s only enough for one dose. One dose for everyone in the village. Who should go without their dose and risk the sickness so you can have your ‘look?’”  
Martin frowned.  
“Jim specializes in tropical medicine and Dr. Benet is a world famous physician. If they can examine the medicine, find out what’s in it, I’m sure they could help make more. You wouldn’t have to depend on just Graham’s clinic to supply it.”  
Patricia turned on her radiant smile, full blast.  
You could practically see the big man melting under her charm. He looked hopefully at Martin who smiled and nodded, toward Benet who bowed slightly.  
“You can have my dose.” He said finally. “If you can make more, it is worth the risk.”  
He opened the door to the storehouse and gestured the visitors inside, while the other men carefully measured out doses in tin cups and handed them to the villagers who were already lining up to receive their medication.

Asked about the “zombies,” Eduardo, the superintendent for the village claimed that they were patients who died of the sleeping sickness, lapsed into unbreakable comas, only to have been awakened and brought back to life by Doctor Graham.  
“They obey his every word.” He said, shivering with dread.

“There’s no doubt.” Dr. Benet stated, looking up from an array of test tubes bubbling on the table.  
“It’s camphor and quinine mixed with food dye and a surprisingly good gin.”  
Martin shook his head.  
“Does it have any real medicinal value?” Patricia asked.  
Dr. Benet smiled wryly.  
“Well, these villagers are unlikely to come down with Malaria any time soon. And it is a very good gin. But beyond that, I cannot see how it could be effective against this sleeping sickness.”  
“And yet, all the surrounding villages have been hit by the sickness and only San Lazaro has been spared. It must be having some effect!”  
Jim banged the flask in his hand on the table.  
“Something very strange is going on here! I think we need to have a talk with this Dr. Graham.”


	31. The God of Life

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Arriving at the clinic in a castle, the Martins discover that it is run by an old acquaintance.

THE GOD OF LIFE  
“Well, that’s a grim place to put a clinic!” Jim exclaimed, looking up at the cannonball-pocked stone towers.  
“It’s the Castillo de Sao Lazare, or San Lazaro if you prefer, an old Portuguese slave fort.” Patricia said. “Grim doesn’t begin to describe it. Hundreds died shackled inside those walls, waiting to be hauled away by the slave traders. Most of the bodies were thrown into the sea, for sharks to eat. The shark infested waters kept slaves from trying to escape by swimming to freedom.”  
Jim looked at his wife with raised eyebrows.  
“I read a book.” She said, smiling sweetly. “While you were busy getting supplies and hiring the launch.”  
Jim grunted and smiled back.  
“Useful habit.”  
Dr. Benet came trudging up at that moment, having fallen behind the young couple on the arduous hike uphill to the fortress-clinic. He squinted at the ominous towers and mopped his brow with a handkerchief.  
“Charming place.”  
“It used to be a Portuguese fort, back in the slave trade days.” Jim said.  
“I know.”  
“It was his book.” Patricia said with an impish laugh.  
Jim sighed, then strode up to the massive iron-bound door to knock.  
Before he could even take hold of the iron-ring, the door creaked open.  
Inside stood the grinning zombie-man from the village. His unnaturally wide smile still in place, he shuffled to the side and pointed into the building with a long bony finger.  
Jim stepped past barely paying attention to their ghastly greeter. Patricia edged in sideways, head turned so as not to look at that unnerving grin. Dr. Benet paused, leaned in to examine the man’s face. He waved a hand in front of those glassy, dull eyes, which neither blinked nor followed the movement of his hand.  
“How strange.” He murmured, before turning and following the Martins.  
The pert African woman sitting at the wooden desk opposite the door smiled as the trio walked in.  
“Welcome! We’ve been expecting you.”  
A young African doctor walked briskly into the room, tugging a wrinkle out of his white smock.  
“Are they here yet?” he asked before looking up and seeing the visitors. “Oh! I guess you are!”  
He grinned at them, then stepped up offering his hand to Jim to shake.  
“I’m Dr. Wei, assistant physician here at San Lazaro. This is Tulip, our nurse and receptionist.  
“My name is not ‘Tulip’.” The woman said through gritted teeth.  
“Well, it should be.” Said Dr. Wei with a laugh.  
Obviously, this was part of some longstanding inside joke between the two of them. One that “Tulip” did not entirely appreciate.  
Patricia was utterly charmed.  
“I am Patricia Martin and this is my husband, Jim. That’s Dr. Felix Benet. We’ve come from the Tropical Medicine Foundation to look into this sleeping sickness problem.”  
“Thank God!” Dr. Wei cried. “It’s about time we got some help from the Outside. We’ve been struggling to keep up with the cases since the plague started. But with this latest wave, we’ve been completely swamped. I am very, very glad to see you!”  
He unexpectedly hugged Dr. Benet, who stiffened with a shocked look on his face before very gingerly patting the young man on the shoulder.  
Patricia stifled a giggle.   
“You seem to have been expecting us.” Jim started.  
“Oh. Yes! Yes!” Wei said, releasing Benet. “Our workmen reported seeing three white visitors in the village when they fetched our supplies. There’s generally only two reasons for outsiders being in San Lazaro. Typically they are either headed inland on safari, or they are coming here to the clinic. With the rains coming, it didn’t seem likely that anyone would be starting an expedition inland now. So, here you are!”  
“I’ll see that your rooms have been prepared and arrange to have you visit the wards. I’ll also notify Dr. Graham, our Director, that you have arrived.”  
“That won’t be necessary, Wei.” Said a deep, rich voice from atop the stairs at the back of the room.  
“Tend to your rounds, and I will take charge of our visitors.”  
The young doctor, somewhat crestfallen, nodded and left the room.  
The stocky Director walked slowly down the stairs rubbing gloved hands together. Even with his face swathed in bandages, his sardonic smile was evident.  
Jim Martin squinted at the bandaged face and his eyes suddenly went wide.  
“No!” he gasped. “It’s not possible!”  
“What?” asked Patricia, anxious at his tone.  
“Don’t you recognize him? That voice, that smug walk, we are blessed with the presence of the ‘God of Life’ himself. Ralph Benson, murderer and crackpot scientist. The Terror of the South Seas.”  
Benson bowed slightly, spreading his hands.  
“Oh, my dear. Don’t you recognize the man you married?”  
Jim Martin snorted in disgust.  
“She only went along with your sick fantasy to save my life. She never really married you.”  
“According to island customs, she did.” Snapped Benson.  
“And according to civilized customs, she didn’t! Besides, the union was never consummated, so there was no legal basis to it.”  
“Oh?” asked Benson, chuckling silently.  
Patricia stared at Benson, horrified, then cast a sidelong glance at Jim. Her mouth worked but no words found their way out.  
Martin didn’t notice, but Benet did. A quick look of realization flashed across his face, then was expertly concealed beneath a mask of impassivity.  
Benson looked at the Martins, first Patricia, then Jim.  
“I see.”  
He shrugged.  
“Well, now that you’re here, there’s time to catch up on all sorts of unfinished business.”  
He gestured and blank faced, wide-eyed zombies flooded into the room, seizing all three of the visitors.


	32. Appointment With Madness

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Dr. Graham" is revealed as Benson, the Mad Doctor of Market Street!

APPOINTMENT WITH MADNESS  
The Martins and Benet were man-handled into a spacious side room dominated by a dinner table and many chairs. The moment Jim was released by the three living zombies who dragged him into the room, he balled up his fists and threw himself at them. He smashed one in the face and gut-punched another. Except for the first’s head bobbing slightly backwards, neither reacted to his blows. They didn’t even blink. He threw another flurry of punches at his unfazed opponents until his wife grabbed him by the shoulder and gently pulled him back.  
“It’s no use, Jim.”  
“They don’t even feel it.” Benet observed, easing gently into a seat at the table. Other than drumming his fingers on the armrest, the Doctor showed no sign of being perturbed by their treatment.  
After a few minutes, the door creaked open and a squat little figure waddled into the room. It was Napoleon the dwarf, dressed in miniature medical smock with a reflective disc on a headband. The dwarf crossed his arms and stared speculatively at the prisoners. Walking with a peculiar rolling gait, he circled the table.  
“Too old.” He declared of Benet, who arched an eyebrow in response.  
“Too…beefy.” He said of Jim, with an exaggerated shudder.  
“Ah!” he exclaimed, coming to Patricia. “Now this is a fine specimen!” Grinning wickedly he pinched her thigh and cackled when she yelped indignantly.  
Jim half rose from his seat, fist cocked.  
Napoleon lifted his chin and pointed at it, daring Jim to hit him.  
Despite his anger, Jim couldn’t make himself punch an opponent who was less than three feet tall. Napoleon laughed harshly when Martin sank back into his seat with a scowl and banged his fist on the table.  
Napoleon walked to a high chair by the head of the table and climbed awkwardly to perch atop it. Kicking his feet, he smirked at the others, temporarily master of the room.  
His moment was short-lived, though. The door swung open again and Dr. Benson walked in, followed by a pretty, glassy-eyed native girl in a short smock who carried a tray with glasses and a bottle.  
Benson settled comfortably into his seat at the head of the table and intertwined his fingers.   
“Now, whatever am I going to do with you?” He mused.  
He nodded to the girl who sat the glasses down and poured drinks from the bottle.  
“Why don’t you start by explaining to us why you’re not dead? The natives on that island were going to throw you into a fire, as I recall.” Snapped Jim.  
“Oh, they did. They did.” Benson sipped from his drink. “As soon as you dragged that poor drowned boy into my hut, I knew I couldn’t revive him. He’d been dead far too long. The natives, however, generously gave me a whole day to try. More than enough time to come up with my own plan.”  
“I filled my pockets with exotic salts and chemicals that I knew would create colored flames and smoke and dramatic flashes. My intention was to hurl them into the fires before those buffoons could toss me in, but they dragged me by my arms and I never got the chance.”  
“Fortunately, I had prepared for that contingency by injecting myself with a diluted version of my suspension serum. I was determined that if I could not escape or forestall my fate, I would at least have a painless death. I was quite completely numb when they threw me into the fire. It is the most amazing sensation, burning alive without any pain. Sort of like being eaten by hot silk streamers.”  
“Of course the natives were horrified by my complete lack of response to the flames, and when the powders in my pockets went off, turning the fire blue and green and sending huge clouds of orange smoke into the sky, they screamed and ran like little children. Completely abandoned the whole island.”  
“With them gone, I strolled out of the fire and made my way back to my hut. I had no idea that I was still burning until I looked in my shaving kit mirror and saw the flames and the grease dripping off my face.”  
“The damage was quite severe. I would have been mad from the pain if it weren’t for my serum’s effect. The pain is still intense and I have to take regular shots of the serum in order to function.”  
Benson paused to sip his drink.  
“You ARE mad! Completely mad!” shouted Jim. That his response was predictable was made plain by Napoleon mouthing the words even as he said them.  
“That’s horrible! No one should have to suffer like that, not even a madman.” Said Patricia with tears in her eyes.  
“Your concern is touching, my dear.” Replied Benson smoothly, if a bit sarcastically.  
“Dr. Martin I know, of course. And you and I are quite familiar with each other. But who is this other guest you bring to my home?”  
“Dr. Benet.” Patricia said dully.  
“Doctor Benet? Doctor Felix Benet? THE Felix Benet? The one the newspapers called ‘The Mad Doctor of the Rue Morgue?’ “  
Benet squared his shoulders and lifted his head, striking an almost regal pose.  
“The same.” He said coolly.  
Benson clapped his hands, and Napoleon echoed the gesture with his own clap.  
“I am a great admirer of your work, Dr. Benet! You are the World’s leading expert on Astrochemistry and its physiological effects. Whatever brings you to San Lazaro with these two?”  
“You have the best gin I have tasted since leaving Europe.” Benet said, raising his glass and draining it with relish.  
Benson laughed with delight.  
“As for these fools, they were a convenient means to facilitate my finding you.”  
Jim banged the table with his fist.  
Patricia looked stricken.  
“And why would you want to find me?” Benson asked, suddenly sounding serious and guarded.  
“Surely you know of my work with Radium X?”  
Benson nodded slowly.  
“I have reason to believe that I might find a sufficient quantity of it to complete my work, here.”  
Benson paused motionless for a moment, then he chuckled and shrugged in acknowledgment.  
“I believe you have come to the right place, Doctor.”  
Benson pushed back from and rose from the table.  
“This is a conversation that perhaps we should have elsewhere. Doctor, if you would join me?”  
Benet smiled smugly. With a casual languid gesture he extended his empty glass.  
“Right after a little more of this very excellent gin.”  
Benson laughed.  
“Bring the bottle.” He snapped at the girl.  
“After you, Doctor.”  
Benet rose to his feet, tugged on his shirt and started toward Benson.  
“Benet, you rat!” yelled Jim Martin, actually red in the face.  
Benet paused and smiled indulgently at the Martins.  
“I thank you for your assistance, you have been most helpful.”  
He gave just a fraction of a bow then walked out the door, followed closely by the serving girl.  
Jim sunk in his chair, anger deflated and a look of bewildered helplessness on his face.  
Patricia looked after Benet with tearful, pleading eyes.  
“Don’t worry.” Benson said to the Martins. “I won’t abandon you for very long. And I will bring someone else in to keep you company.”  
He pulled the door all the way open.  
“Dan! Could you come in here and keep an eye on our guests?”   
The Martins shrunk back as a tall, burly man squeezed through the door.  
He was dressed from neck to toe in a thick rubber suit. His eyes were wide and staring, but unlike the other zombies, there was a spark of awareness burning in them. His chalk-white face was expressionless.  
“They are not to leave the room.” Benson whispered to him. “Do whatever you must to keep them here.”  
Dan McCormick nodded slowly. The blankness of his face hardened into something between a snarl and a grimace.  
The Martins stayed in their chairs as the door closed.


	33. Astrochemistry

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Benson shows Dr. Benet his laboratory.

ASTROCHEMISTRY  
Dr. Benet stepped into a laboratory out of a nightmare. Surgical tables, shelves full of test tubes and beakers, whip-like antennae with crackling sparks writhing between them, glass globes filled with pulsating fiery masses, condensers and transformers and banks of esoteric electrical apparatus, all crowded together in what must have once been a dry powder magazine. Benet spotted some familiar looking equipment huddled wasp-like in a corner.  
“Ah, another variation on dear old Heinrich’s apparatus!” he exclaimed.  
He stepped closer to inspect the device, and was forced to let out a grudging nod of acknowledgment.  
“A much better design than most, I must admit.”  
Benson stood in the middle of his shrine to mad science, arms crossed as if he were hugging himself.  
“My father worked for his son. I am a friend of the family and trade correspondence with them regularly. They have been…very helpful.”  
“I see. And just what is it that you are seeking to accomplish with all of this?”  
“Oh, nothing trivial, I assure you. Merely the eradication of death itself!”  
“A very laudable ambition.” Benet said, guardedly, careful not to give away his true feelings.  
The man was utterly mad!  
“Indeed! I thought you would approve.”  
Benet did no such thing but kept his silence. He raised an eyebrow in a convincing facsimile of curiosity.   
“First, I invented an anesthetic so powerful that it suspended all the functions of life, without snuffing out the spark of animation itself. Subjects so treated can lie in a state indistinguishable from death for an indefinite period, but still be revived at a later time by the injection of a counter-stimulant.”  
“What kind of stimulant could reverse so profound a coma?” Benet asked.  
“Initially, I used a combination of adrenalin and a suffusion of a rare African herb, generally believed to be extinct by modern science but well known by the ancient Egyptians. Needless to say, such an exotic ingredient was difficult and astronomically expensive to procure. The herb only grows in an isolated mountainous area surrounded by desert and is tended by a cult of insane, mummy-worshipping priests. Nasty lot.”  
“So, in later formulas I substituted a solar distillate of Zilithium, as described in your works, Dr. Benet.”  
“Ah, my small contribution to the annals of science.” Benet said, almost ruefully.  
“But the results were not always what I was looking for. I could suspend life and then return it at will, but I wanted a way to make those revived more…compliant. Obedient. To this end, I have been employing the Rigas Procedure, passing intense modulated electrical current through the brain during the reanimation process. The results have been extraordinary! You can see them wandering about the castle even now.”  
“The so-called ‘zombies’.” Benet said in almost a whisper, passing a hand over his face.  
“Exactly, the ‘zombies.’ But I want to accomplish more. I don’t want just shuffling obedient automatons. I want to produce the kind of unstoppable, undefeatable super-men that Rigas only dreamed of creating.”  
“You want to create an army of atomic supermen.”  
“Exactly!”  
The man was stark raving mad, and not even particularly ingenuous, Benet thought. Except for the suspended animation formula, everything in the laboratory was cobbled together from the work of more creative geniuses. Even Benson’s ambitions were borrowed from the ravings of others who had come before him.  
“The Zilithium distillate wasn’t strong enough to empower the kind of creation I imagined. However, I have managed to find a more powerful, less ephemeral power source.”  
“Radium X.” Benet said.  
“Radium X!” Benson cried triumphantly.  
“So, you have secured a supply of it.” Benet said nodding. “How much have you acquired?”  
“ALL OF IT!” Benson shouted, raising his arms ecstatically. His mad laughter echoed through the chamber, mingling with the snap of sparks, the bubbling of chemicals, and the whirring of infernal devices.


	34. Prisoners of the Electric Man

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jim and Pat Martin find themselves confined to a room, guarded by The Electric Man.

PRISONERS OF THE ELECTRIC MAN  
“Can you hear anything?”  
“No.” answered Jim, his ear to the teak door. “Can’t even hear anyone breathing.”  
Tentatively he tested the door knob. It turned freely.  
“I don’t think it’s even locked.” Snorted Jim.  
“I don’t like this.” Patricia hugged her chest and bit her lower lip. “I think it’s a trap.”  
Jim frowned furiously. He turned the door knob again, eased it back, careful not to make any noise.  
Angrily he stepped away from the door and stared at it so intensely it seemed he was trying to peer through the wood to the other side.  
“What is Benson up to this time?” He wondered aloud.  
Jim Martin began to angrily pace the length of the small room they’d been shoved into. There was only one door and a slit of a window less than two feet wide that looked down a sheer cliff to crashing waves below. Jim glanced out the window, sucking in a deep breath of hot, brine-scented air. Almost on cue, a shark’s fin broke the surface a few yards out and did a few lazy circles before sinking below the waves.  
“Whatever it is, he wants us alive. For now.” Said Patricia who sat perched on the edge of the narrow hospital bed that was the only furniture in the room. The only other thing in the room was a bucket sat in a corner.  
“It’s the ‘for now’ that worries me.”  
After a few more circuits of the room, he came to an abrupt halt by the door.  
“I’m going to take a look.” He whispered after a long moment.  
“Jim…” started Patricia, but it was already too late.  
Jim yanked the door, which was not locked, wide open.  
Standing less than a foot away on the other side was a huge hulking brute of a man clothed from foot to neck in a heavy insulating suit of thick rubber. His face was locked in an angry grimace. Sparks of blue-white light crawled beneath his chalk white skin. There was a faint sizzling, crackling sound very much like bacon frying, coming from him.  
Jim’s hair writhed as it stood on end. The hairs on his arms rose in a tingling wave.  
With no change in his expression, not even a twitch in his clenched face muscles, the huge man planted a gloved hand on Jim’s chest and shoved him so hard that Martin was catapulted off his feet and knocked half-way across the room. He fell in a heap on the hard wood floor. At the same time there was a loud pop, a crack of static electricity loud as a gunshot.  
Jim lay dazed and wide-eyed on the floor.  
The Electric Man reached in, grabbed the door knob and, with a tic pulling at his left cheek, slammed the door shut again.  
“Are you hurt?” Patricia asked, falling off the bed to kneel at Jim’s side.  
Jim shook his head.  
“Just bruised.” He mumbled, stumbling to his feet.  
Patricia helped him to the bed. Clearly he was stunned from more than the fall on the floor.  
He laid on the bed for a long while, blinking wide-eyed at the ceiling.  
Hours passed.  
The Martin’s took turns napping on the bed.  
The heat was unbearable. What breeze that drifted in through the window only brought even hotter air from outside.  
Periodically the door would open and a blank-eyed grinning native girl in a hospital smock shuffled in with bowls of porridge, or trays of fruit and a pitcher of water. No utensils were provided.  
After an interminable period of time, Patricia stepped quietly to the door.  
Jim was snoring on the bed.  
Carefully she opened the door, just a crack.  
The grimacing pale face was just beyond, dark eyes staring at her.  
“Hi! Dan, isn’t it?” she said sweetly. She turned her smile on high. “Would you like to talk for a bit? You have to be at least half as bored as I am.”

After a long, fitful sleep filled with nightmares about cannibals and surgical torture, Jim woke to the sound of his wife’s voice. She was chattering away in an animated tone, punctuated often with a girlish laugh or two. Jim rubbed his bleary eyes.  
“What the hell?”  
Groggily he sat up and looked around.  
The door to their prison room stood wide open.  
The big rubber-clad man stood braced in the doorway, his arms menacingly akimbo at his sides. On his pasty-pale face, however, the tight clenched grimace of before had been replaced by a frowning, slightly baffled curious look.  
Pat, his wife, was sitting cross-legged on the floor, practically at the huge brute’s feet, looking up and chatting happily. Her long, lean, tanned legs were bare, her dress hiked up around her hips.  
“What the hell?” mumbled Jim.  
Patricia heard her husband waking and turned to give him a quick warning look and a placating hand gesture.  
The Electric Man looked up from her to glare darkly at Jim.  
“It’s okay, dear.” Said Pat merrily. “Dan and I have just been having a lovely chat.”  
Jim grunted.  
Bare legs, full blast smile, even girlish laughs. Jim half felt sorry for the poor dumb brute guarding the door. He didn’t know it yet, but he was badly outmatched. No one could stand against Pat’s charms when she went full out!  
Jim mumbled some jealous grumble, then settled back, arms crossed behind his head, to watch the show.


End file.
